There was a coffee shop in Cambridge with a basement. I think it was like, a Starbucks. Something mainstream. I was definitely not worried about going to small local cafes when I was 17. Who gives a shit when it all has caffeine in it.

We were preparing for our A-Level exams, at a time when I frankly could not give less of a shit. My time somehow felt better spent playing Team Fortress 2 and drinking Coca Cola.

One day, a friend of mine in sixth form asked if I wanted to revise in the schools library during a free period. Probably something to do with Biology, our one shared subject. I said yeah. We went. I revised. It was fucking boring. But ultimately, I was glad I said yes.

A week later, he asked if I wanted to meet up in town at the Starbucks and revise there. I got a latte, and we sat in the basement seating area. I performatively revised my Philosophy books, flipping through the pages and writing 3 lines of notes (Descartes is boring sorry to say). All while I thought about playing video games and drinking soda. We didn’t revise together again. He works in recruitment or something now.

I don’t think that coffee shop exists anymore. I looked it up on Google maps, I am pretty sure it's a Five Guys now. It’s weird that, the Starbucks or whatever, at that time only really exists in my head. And I guess the heads of others who were there. And I guess also this blog post. And maybe Google images.

But those other things will probably miss the things that I remember. The dark walls with the awful spotlights. The spotty wifi which made using my HTC Desire nearly impossible. The well used cracked leather seating. The way the round table wasn’t quite what I would call sticky, but definitely sticky adjacent.

Those things, memories, only exist in my head. One day that won’t exist either. None of this will. At least, I hope it won't.

Last year I wrote a blog post about AI. Like lots of random writing I do, it was to record my feelings about it at the time. This post incorporates some of that post. I didn’t publish it because I foresaw the company I work for heading more in the direction of AI generation, and it felt important to not be overly critical publicly of AI. Ultimately I do still live under capitalism and want to advance in my job. I must believe those on LinkedIn trying to sell shovels in a gold rush, or how will I continue in my career?

My feelings around AI have not really changed. I can theoretically see a lot of potential use for an LLM in day to day life. As a translator you can run on a small device like your phone without internet connection, so you can translate text wherever you are in the world. As a parser of random inputted data, trying to produce something cohesive for another program. It has genuine, useful applications. Is it ethical? Fuck no. But it is kind of cool sometimes.

But I think it’s been long enough that we should start just being honest about it. We need to stop listening to the shovel sellers. And the shovel manufacturers. And the people who have purchased $10 billion in shovels who tell us how good the shovels are and that you need to also buy shovels. And the people making the wood handles. We should stop listening to every liar who has sold themselves out and can no longer see the top of the hole they have dug. We should let them rot in their holes.

Almost every word I see from people who are peddling these LLMs are lies. And they are scrambling and coping because if what they were promised isn’t true, then they have also been sold a lie, and who would want to admit that? “In 5 years, 50% of gold miners will be out of their jobs because of these shovels” no they won’t. And even if they do, then what? What happens when you make 50% of workers redundant, and also made it so we are no longer supposed to read and write. Or no longer make art because hey these machine can make Goku smoking a cigarette in Van Gogh’s art style. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that what you wanted when you went to University and got that degree in that thing you loved?

I recently travelled to Cork in Ireland for a Super Smash Bros Melee event. Yeah, I know. I timed the trip door to door, with a rule of no flying, from where I live in Sheffield to the hotel in Cork. It took 19 hours straight of travelling, using trams trains and a ferry. It's a long time, but that experience was great. I truly believe it is almost always about the journey, not the destination. And the journey can feel easy if that’s why you’re on it. It also helps that the event was good. I love going to new places, talking to new people.

The journey home was split across 3 days instead of doing just another 19 hour day. It was a lot less exhausting, and Dublin is also pretty nice. I would love if I could spend my life travelling. Maybe when AI replaces my job I can.

AI feels like it’s exclusively about the destination. We want to skip the journey bit as quickly as possible. CEO’s froth at the mouth thinking about making even more money for even less work than they already do. And we can have less employees along the way? Sign me up! The Anthropic CEO said so. Almost all coding will be done with AI by the end of 2025! Stop, don’t look at the calendar. I meant 2026. Or 2027.

And it generates meaningless cycles of slop which do nothing to actually advance us. Do you remember when like, in 2022 they were speaking about how ChatGPT is going to usher in a new era of knowledge and understanding. A new enlightenment, as we reach brand new science and medical breakthroughs all the time because of this cool technology?

Brother, at work it is being used to make Jira tickets, and then have another LLM agent read those Jira tickets and reply to them. It is being used to reply to AI generated emails. Why the fuck are we doing any of that? Have we so totally lost the plot that we no longer understand the need for real human people to be involved in the things we do? If you are using these tools like this, stop! When it goes wrong, Claude will not get the blame. You will! And you will be part of the 50% of laid off workers, and won’t be because your job was replaced by AI.

That’s what they want. Devices made of lies, theft and hype. Please stop thinking. Switch off your brain and press that little generate button, read our generated summaries so you don't ever have to engage again! Why read a book when an LLM can give you a summary of it! These companies need you to need all this for their self fulfilling cycle they have produced to continue. From them forcing it into our day to day life, or into the tools you use at work, right up to government policy and infrastructure. If they don’t win right now with all of this, we all lose, right?!

ChatGPT and Claude, they are ultimately tools which were created by capitalists, but will be exploited by fascists. From the silicon it is generated on to the people running the companies, it at some point needs to be stopped.

I hope that it comes crashing down, those that played a hand in getting to where we are today, we let them rot. I hope that one day, like my memories and me, they will also not exist.

I worry that we are too late. In saying no, in creating policy to prevent these mathematical demon boxes from being used. That everything we are will eventually be distilled into one of these horrible machines. After we're gone, it can pretend to be me, or you. I am not important enough to be scraped into Claude automatically, thank god. But because I write candidly and about myself someone could just point one of these machines here, wrap it in human skin and pretend it was me. It’s not enough to make you redundant in your workplace. Strip you of your creativity. Your soul. I don't think they will be happy until your death is just as meaningless. Who gets to say no as they steal all of us?

Do you want to grab a coffee?

My original post was called “The ProbLLM with Popplers” after the Futurama episode. It’s a bit of an on the nose comparison, but I’d recommend giving the episode a watch. It was a lot angrier than this post, and I have written this in an evening as a re-write.

No AI tools were used in making this post.

I am currently on the train back home from Brighton. I wrote this post on my phones Notes app this morning while I sat on the bed in my AirBnB, after a post run shower. It is a bit weird and personal, I think.

I’m surprised how windy it is immediately. I step out onto the street in my shorts and T-shirt, mid December, to a biting wind coming in from the seafront. “Fuck” I realise I have forgotten to bring down my AirPods as I pat my pockets, as if they are going to appear if I just pat just one more time. Not wanting to waste the 2 minutes it would take me to get them, I do my quick warmups which apparently help prevent my heart exploding again. A sight I must appear. Stepping over the street, the Marina to my left, pier to my right, I set off in a light jog.

Brighton holds a strange place in my head, and heart. My family have historical connections to the area, with many aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents at one time having lived nearby. When I was a kid, this was our frequent days away destination. We would end up in Brighton multiple times a year. It was our tradition at New Years to come here, and spend our collection 2p coins collected over the year in the coin slot machines. I was always afraid of falling through the wood slats of the pier. Who can blame me when sometimes there were pieces of wood missing with just a small “watch out” sign.

I run up by the pier. The gates are all locked up. It is only 7:30. It’s not quite dark, but it isn’t quite light yet either. I decide to run along the road first, then on the way back along the beach front.

All of my memories of Brighton take place exclusively on the pier, the beach, and the drive past the pavilion. I feel we very rarely went into the town, and if we did it’s something my brain doesn’t want to remember anymore. But the pier, I remember well. It’s a lot of arcade machines in my head. The crazy taxi cabinet I’m pretty sure with its pedal and wheel. Occasional Time Crisis plays if we had the money. I never went on the wee rollercoaster at the end. My brother did, but that was always more his kind of thing. I regret that now I’m not allowed to go on rollercoasters.

If I’m honest it feels like the seafront here has not changed much at all. Its vibes are familiar, especially in the winter. But I’m running up now to the biggest change. A colossal tower rising out of the seafront, allowing people to rise some 150 metres into the air and maybe see France, I guess. As I get closer I can’t help but be stunned by its enormity compared to everything else around. It’s rare I think to feel so utterly lost as to why something exists. It feels like an interloper in my memories of this place.

I remember one time, one of the few times, seeing my dad angry here. We had come to visit Brighton over the summer I think, and we were trying to find a parking spot. As you can imagine, a Victorian seafront is probably not the most hospitable place for a modern family car hold 2 adults 3 children and a cool box full of cheese and salad cream sandwiches (don’t ask). We must have spent an hour going around in the car trying to find somewhere to park. In the frustration of that, and my mother’s nitpicking of his decisions, he had a minor outburst. It wasn’t much, a sprinkling of anger that I saw, but he was normally so calm. Or at least, defeated. It’s one of the few times in my life he felt real.

We are onto the wide pedestrian path of Hove Beach now. The wind is at my side, pushing me inland. It’s neither helping nor hindering my run, but it is always there. I kind of wish I had my AirPods now, I have spent the whole run thinking about the past. Normally blasting music keeps it quiet. But I’m untethered from that now, just the sound of my feet, the ocean and the gulls. I come up to the colourful beach huts. This is my turning around point, to start heading back to the pier and finish my 5k.

It wasn’t just Brighton on our south coast excursions, we would often go to Christchurch and Bournemouth, where the other half of our family resided. I’m pretty sure my great aunt owned a beach hut on one of these beaches, or we knew somebody who did. We came here less frequently, but still plenty, and on its much nicer sandy beach my brother and I would dig big holes and bury each other in the sand. That’s one thing Brighton does not have going for it, a really nice beach. I hated the stones growing up, they hurt my feet and I could never skim them as well as my brother. But I have no real love for Bournemouth like I sort of do for Brighton. It’s funny as well, I never really noticed until this moment that in these memories I can’t actually remember my parents.

Heading back now, I run a bit closer to the beach front. I’m taking in how stormy it look. How grey. How menacing. Splatters of sea water breach the mass of water as it strikes the pebbles, landing on my skin. It’s not raining, but it’s like being back home.

I got my first sailing certificate when I was around 8. We were living in between Southhampton and Portsmouth, and my dad decided we would take up sailing. We braved it in all weathers, and I always remember the cold of the winter months. The choppy seas being both frightening and exciting in equal measure. Me and another kid would take out an Oppie every Saturday morning into the Solent, come rain or shine, and come back in a couple of hours later shivering to the core. I will always remember the feeling under those warm showers, peeling off the wet suit, shedding our skin of the salt of the sea. Eventually we would upgrade to the much cooler and faster Topper, which we would take out and go as fast as possible. A story for another time.

I’m back at the big observation tower now, but this time I’m below it on the sea front. I didn’t really notice it before, but it’s been placed directly in front of the old west pier. It sounds stupid but I feel a kinship with this mess of poles just off the beach. We are both not the same as we once were. I remember when the pier had some structure, before the storms and the fires. We all weather what comes, but this has not faired well. Looking back up at the tower, I stupidly mark down in my phone about how funny it is they put the cancerous tower on the sea front next to the rotting corpse of the pier. “Maybe it is the right place for the tower really.” I really hate myself sometimes.

I stopped going away with my family as a teenager. Most teenagers probably do the same. To retreat a bit. Try and figure out who they are outside the context of their family. I also just wanted to retreat from my family. The arguments, the void. I didn’t come back to Brighton for about 8 years, until a friend of mine from Cambridge in his classic Mini wanted to do the Ally Pally to Brighton Mini run. So off we went to London, joined the procession, and made our way to the seafront. We parked where we could (my friend would later get a parking ticket), and walked the sea of cars. I was surprised how out of place I felt to be back in Brighton. Like meeting up with a school friend who you haven’t seen in a decade. This feeling is why I don’t go back to where I went to school, and generally avoid anywhere from my past. It doesn’t feel good to remember sometimes.

I run up to the base of a ramp nearest the pier. The run is over. 5.01km. I’m just off the side of the pier now. I take a breath in. It wasn’t a particularly taxing run, I spent a bunch of it taking photos. But it does feel nice to take in new air. Along the front of the pier again now, I walk past the mini golf course. I remember that. It used to look different, but also the same. People doing their morning runs go past me. The weird zip line corkscrew isn’t lit up in technicolor like it was last night. It looks a lot sadder in the morning. At the hotel door now, I note that next time I won’t forget my AirPods. Glad I bought the gloves with me, though. Check out is at 11am. I am writing this sentence on my phone at 10:38am. Better hurry.

For something so boring and simply numeric, the turn of the millennium felt like the biggest deal in the world. Everything for half my life had been leading up to this moment. Adverts on TV, discussions at school, headlines in the newspapers. Everything. A box of cereal would have some reference to the millennium on it. News reports about how the computers we would handle a number ticking up by 1, killing millions. We had just found out about Pokémon. Think what’s next? I can’t overstate how important it felt as a 6-year-old. This was it. We even decided to build a huge dome in our capital city for this event for some reason. It’s still there.

Anticipation overspilled. The day had finally come. Humans have seemingly waited a thousand years for this. “Sydney already had their celebrations, they’re in the future!”. Evening came, we bundled into the cars in the depths of winter and drove to the Portsmouth seafront. We had just moved down to the English south coast, after spending my life so far in Scotland. It was never going to match the beauty of rural Aberdeenshire. But here, at least, we could experience the millennium with more people around. They were even building a tower for it [1].

The cars arrived, and we alighted. Excited bodies stood around waiting for the fireworks to begin. I had my camera with me, intent on capturing this momentous occasion for future generations. Just imagine what my grandchildren would think of my photos from the millennium. I could say I was there. That I captured it, as society moved on to the next step. The future. The year 2000.

The sky starts to illuminate. Booms ring out across the bay.

I press the shutter button. Again. And again.

A week passes, my parents take the film to Boots. A 2-hour turnaround. Not bad. The envelope containing the printed pictures gets handed to me.

You cannot see anything in any of the photos.

Photography has always been “my thing”. When I was wee, I was given a plastic Fisher Price kids' camera. With this fresh new tool in hand, I kind of gave myself the task of documenting the “things” we did. Holidays, Christmas, family visits, the millennium. I could see no reason not to take photos of absolutely everything. So for the last 25 years, I have tried to take photos of as much as I could.

Starting at the beginning, and looking through my first photos, there are many things I like about them. I like that they are “bad” photos. They are all poorly exposed. The framing is all over the place (kids love a good Dutch angle), something I still struggle to do today. Some of them are just straight up out of focus and blurry, basically unused. Ultimately, though, they feel more real because of the flaws they possess. Taken by someone who was just trying to capture something.

Take these, for example.

For you, these are probably not that interesting. There is nothing in their content that is particularly fun to look at. But they show something to me, and you’ll have photos like this, which mean something to you too. These are from my time in Scotland, which, as time passes, I remember vanishingly little about. These photos are a little portal into my memories of that time. When I see that sandpit in the photo, where previously there was a void, the memory becomes clear. Moving and shaping the sand, making little race track circuits to run my matchbox vehicles around. If it wasn’t for these photos, these memories would probably be gone forever.

There are photos I have taken for every year of my life that are like this. From the age of 3, through my teenage years, to now.

I think we should give all kids a camera. A real one, not a phone. They won’t get a second chance at capturing the memories, and you also get their unique viewpoint. An old digital camera would be enough. Light and cheap for hands big or small. Maybe it’s not like this for you, but for me, those memories that I captured are so much stronger than those that I didn’t.

If it were affordable (and it isn’t), I would recommend that anyone use film to take photos every now and then. Even if it’s just a cheap modern disposable, just buy a couple and take them when you go on holiday. There is something about the photos themselves going through a bunch of physical processes, from pressing the shutter to viewing them, which makes it special. You are also limited in the number of photos you can take, so you spend extra time and thought to make sure you take meaningful ones. And when some of the photos inevitably don’t work, that is great too. That forms part of the story of the photos. Each step of taking these photos is just different from the photos I usually take every day on my phone. It’s a fantastic magic trick. Capturing light interacting with crystals spread over a piece of plastic, made permanent in a dark room by an alchemist. There is nothing like it.

Printing photos is something I don’t know if people do anymore. It’s that I can hold an individual photo and look at it outside of a screen. These old ones from childhood have been printed on the cheap paper Boots used for their quick turnaround. But you can feel them in your hands, pick them up, put them into a book, re-arrange them, cut them up. Photo printing has gotten even more expensive in the last couple of years, but I think it’s worth it to hold these memories. I do it when I can for my film photos, just to hold them.

There is something wonderful about just the act of wanting to remember. A place, a friend, a moment. There is a collective understanding we have that there will come a time, one day, when you will not remember this. What you are experiencing, then, when, now, it's transient.

Forgetting stuff is something I think about a lot. Every day since my heart surgery, I have become more forgetful. I wish it were because I was just getting older. Maybe it is, but it wasn’t like this before. It’s like a gnawing, eating away at my past. It creates an emptiness where precious memories used to live. It affects my memory of the moments that happened 20 years ago, and the moments that happened 20 seconds ago. It's the hardest bit, besides the whole heart thing.

I have taken tens of thousands of photos throughout my life. I will hopefully take tens of thousands more. This year I have taken around 1200 film photos, and over 3000 photos with my phone. Those photos allow me to have some semblance of memory. If you ask me what I did at the weekend, or what I’ve been up to since we last met, I will probably look at my phone's picture roll and use that as a guide. Because I will forget it all otherwise. It is embarrassing, but I am making do with what I have right now.

I am meandering a lot here, talking about film photos and why I think they’re great. But don’t mistake it for not also loving my phone's camera. Without it, I don’t know how I could remember my life. There are aesthetic things I consider with film photos that don’t even cross my mind when it comes to phone photos. Because I point, I shoot, I remember. Almost all my phone photos are in portrait, because I know I will only look at them on my phone. My picture book scratch pad acting as a replacement brain.

There’s something I want to say here, but I don’t really know what. There was a point, but I forgot. I started writing this months ago.

Do you remember Tumblr, back in the day? I used to use it to view other people's photos quite often, back when I thought I could be a photographer. I liked how pure it could be. Very little text, and your photos. I occasionally posted my photos on there. No one looked at them. I liked that.

Sharing for the sake of sharing. On most platforms, you must chase the algorithm, following and influence. I don’t share on Twitter because it’s full of racists and cunts that want to ruin people's day. I don’t have a Facebook account anymore because I don’t want that much data about me available to the company. So I use Instagram in a basic capacity. An app that allows me to just post as much as I want, to basically no one. I take up server space for the sake of it. I just want to post and share pictures from my phone and my camera, and leave. That’s how my photos are meant to be. They’re for me, and for you. No one else.

When I was 16, I did not get my predicted GCSE grades. I was depressed, abused, and lost. But I loved taking pictures. I used a Nikon D5000, a mid-level DSLR, which for the time was great. A definitive upgrade from the Pentax DSLR I had been using for the 3 years prior. For out and about, I had my Sony Ericsson K800i.

I would move to sixth form that September, and I wanted to do photography. But I had fucked my Art GCSE grade, only achieving a C, below the high standards of the sixth form in Cambridge, where I was to attend. Sixth form informed of my grades, I was asked to come in a week or two before the new school year started, and to bring in a portfolio of photos I had taken to show to the photography teacher to see whether I would be a good match. I arrived and handed him my book of pictures. He looked at the photos. He told me no, I was not good enough. I ended up doing Philosophy instead.

Someone said to me a while ago that I was good at everything. I think this rejection was the moment I decided, at the very least, to always be earnest in whatever I attempted, and to try at the things I care about. I am not good at everything. In fact, I think I am good at very little. And I have been imperfect in my attempts at trying over the years. But I know, now, the only thing that matters is that I do try. For me. I hope you try for what matters to you, too.

I will keep taking photos until the day I die. Maybe I will take photos that day too. They hold no artistic weight, but I will still consider them art. Your photos are art too. My photos will hold no value to you, but they will hold memories for me. I will share them with you, and hope you share with me too.

Maybe I will start a Tumblr again. I hear it has been making a comeback.

[1] Construction of the tower wouldn’t start until after the millennium in 2001, and it wouldn’t open until 2005. Because of the delay, the Millennium Tower ended up being called Spinnaker Tower. Calling it Millennium Tower 5 years after the millennium would just look silly.

I am running another 10k next weekend in Sheffield (28th of September). The run is for myself, not for a charity. However, today is Aortic Dissection Awareness Day, and this post aims to raise awareness of, something. So from now until I have finished the 10k on the 28th September, I will be doubling all donations made to any of the following charities:

• The Aortic Dissection Charitable Trust - https://aorticdissectioncharitabletrust.org/donate/
• Aortic Dissection Awareness - https://aorticdissectionawareness.org/
• Macmillan Cancer Support UK - https://donation.macmillan.org.uk/
• Medical Aid For Palestinians (MAP) - https://www.map.org.uk/

Send me a receipt of your donation via Instagram, Twitter, or if you know me another platform or messaging app just do it there, and I will double it. (Up to a reasonable amount, which I will try to make as high as possible).

In this post, I am going to talk about aortic dissection, cancer, and being misdiagnosed by medical professionals. It will include some photos of hospital environments.

Did you know there are over 200 types of cancer? Did you also know that in the UK, on average, over 1000 people receive a cancer diagnosis each day? That comes out to around 400,000 people a year. It’s ~0.6% of the UK’s population every year.

That is a lot of people going through the worst day of their lives every single day. A lot of families having their lives turned upside down by a scan or biopsy, processing the most destructive words ever uttered to them, said by a caring professional sat in a clean white room.

167,000 people will also die from cancer this year (from the statistics provided by Macmillan).

I find the statistics for cancer hard to grasp in their enormity. It is just an unbelievable number. We all know people who have had cancer, and who might not be here now because of it. Each year, it is an entire small city’s population that vanishes because of cancer.

I don’t know the symptoms for every kind of cancer. No one does. But I know the basics of what to look out for. To know when I should go to the doctors and say, “Hey, this is a bit weird, can we check this out please?”. This is thanks to the awareness and outreach the NHS does, or flyers and adverts from one of the cancer charities that exist in the UK. These organisations have saved thousands of lives by just giving you and doctors the basic information of what cancer is, and what to search for.

It is an underrated part of their work. We think about the research into curing cancer, the time spent treating it, trying to eradicate it, or helping families of survivors, and remembering those who didn’t make it. But one of the critical parts of it all is awareness. They have made cancer famous. And it works; outcomes have improved because of earlier detection. Everyone and their dog knows the basic signs of the biggest cancers.

I luckily do not, and have not had, cancer. But the stories of those who have are probably my closest analog to being my age with a life-threatening condition. I have read quite a few of them. I find them both strangely comforting and heartbreaking.

A quick question. Prior to reading this blog or meeting/talking to me about hearts, did you know what an aortic dissection was?

Today is “Aortic Dissection Awareness Day”. When I had my aortic dissection, it remained misdiagnosed by doctors for over 4 months. Because no one thought to check. It isn’t as famous as cancer is, and it doesn't happen to young people.

My first trip to A&E was met with “this guy has just taken a ton of drugs” from the doctors. This was not helped by the fact that after ~20 hours I returned to “normal”, and during that time I was pretending my bed being pushed around the hospital was a Formula 1 car. They did a scan of my head during that visit because I was presenting neurological symptoms, being blind and unable to properly string together thoughts, and they found nothing. That scan has given me a future album cover, though. Might have been worth it.

My second trip to A&E 2 weeks later was labeled as just anxiety, which is why my heart rate was through the roof. They didn’t really do much this time besides a blood test to check if I had a heart attack or not. I got dismissed by a cardiologist this time, who assured me nothing was wrong.

Over the next 4 months I went to the GP 9 times, complaining that something was wrong. I kept getting told it was just stomach acid, anxiety, “well, we’re just not really sure what it is”. Take these stomach drugs and see if your symptoms improve. But I knew something else was wrong within myself, like nothing else I have known in my body before.

In one of those GP trips I finally got a referral to cardiology at my local hospital. A month later, I get my appointment with the Columbo of cardiology, and after an hour of prodding my pasty doughy body, said alright, lets just do a CT scan of your chest and see what if anything comes up.

Another month passes, I get my scan. A week on from that, I am called in, and have emergency heart surgery. I haven’t yet gloated to the GP with an “I told you so”.

I had never heard of an aortic dissection until about 4 hours before my chest was sawed open and my heart was bared to the air for the first time in my life. Hopefully it was the last time too.

Timely diagnosis is for aortic dissection is critical for survival. The Think Aorta campaign says a type A dissection like I had the mortality rate is around 1% every hour, with 48% of people not making it to the hospital in the first place. I lived some 2500 hours. I was even in the hospital within 6 hours of it happening, and that almost didn’t matter. I was lucky.

No one should have to rely on luck to survive.

In the UK we have a couple of charities which put out resources hoping to improve the awareness aspect of aortic dissection. There is Aortic Dissection Awareness (I love a good clear name) which focus mainly on diagnosis and was set up by aortic dissection survivors. They have their Think Aorta campaign, designed specifically for health care professionals to consider AD as a potential diagnosis. And The Aortic Dissection Charitable Trust who I have fundraised for before, which funds awareness and research. They are both good options for your support.

Have you ever seen any material about the symptoms of aortic dissection? Have you ever seen a Think Aorta campaign poster?

It’s easy to see how it all gets lost. Out in the world, there are healthcare charities, child charities, pet charities, homelessness charities, food band charities, local charities, and foreign outreach charities. They all compete for the space and time against the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government, or the theft of Ukrainian land, or the removal of rights from women and the LGBT community at the hands of governments, or weird podcasters getting shot in high definition. It's impossible.

Every day I am flooded with information. Actual, real atrocities, happening in real time. How are you supposed to remember to look out for the signs of aortic dissection in that world?

I think this constant firehose of information can both be a blessing and a curse. On one hand I have never been more energised to get involved with the world, try and change things. To talk about my heart, or to get involved in politics. I would never know as much about as many topics that mean something to me without all of this.

On the other hand, it is an impossibly daunting task. It feels like building a sandcastle while someone constantly sprays water over it and calls you mean names. Anything positive is immediately drowned in rising tides of information. Momentum for causes is lost almost immediately.

This is what these charities are having to compete against, for topics they are passionate about and save lives. Your air time against the backdrop of genocide, political infighting, and a Minecraft streamer playing Subway Surfers. It’s an unreasonable task. But they do it anyway, and they need your help.

I was at the GP the other week for one of my regular blood tests. On the noticeboard, there was a new NHS made aortic aneurysm poster, highlighting some of the key symptoms to look out for. An aortic aneurysm is closely related to an aortic dissection (my AD ended up in an AA), so I was interested in what information the poster could give to someone who might be a bit concerned. The first thing you notice when you look at the poster is written in big bold text in the middle:

“OVER THE AGE OF 65?”

I was 29 when it happened to me. There is still a long way to go.

If you made it this far, thank you for letting me go on a tangent. I didn’t set out to talk about the troubles of awareness when I wanted to write something for today. But I am going to use this space to give some awareness of the symptoms related to aortic dissection. If someone:

• Having a sudden sharp tearing pain in their chest,
• Is complaining of neck or back pain
• Numbness in their limbs
• Sudden confusion or loss of sight
• Vomiting and sweating a lot

It could be an aortic dissection, and tell the person on the other end of the 999 line that it could be too. You might just save someone’s life, and help make that 50% of people dying statistic a little lower.

Sometimes I wish I had never been made aware of what an aortic dissection was. In the same way, it would be nice to live a life where no one gets cancer. Where everyone can live in their home without fear. But I can make you aware of this one thing in particular which nearly killed me. That little bit of extra awareness might save someone’s life.

It is my 2-year “aortaversary”. A funny word that is supposed to signify 2 years since they stopped my heart and fixed it.

I write these blog posts a week or two in advance before I actually post them. It’s nice to just mull it over, think about what I am saying is what I actually want to say. I’m not a good writer. But it does make what I want to say clearer to me, firmer in direction. More accurate. For this one, there have been 5 different drafts over the last couple of months. They all take a variety of routes through the last year, covering a variety of different parts of what has happened and who it happened to, what has changed. And I dunno, I don’t think I liked any of them. What am I supposed to write for being surviving 2 years?

So today I scraped them all, and I am writing this the evening before the 2-year anniversary. There’s no theme, no editing. I won’t mull this post over. I am going to vomit a bunch of things at you, which I apologise for. But you know, it is my fucking blog.

Numbers, and goals for the next 18 years

From the first moment I knew what was going on, I was pretty obsessed with the numbers involved with my body. You get told a <10% chance of making it to the surgery, an 85% chance of surviving the heart surgery to replace your ascending aorta, how lucky you are. And then you’re surrounded by numbers. You’re hooked up to a machine that tells you your heart rate every bloody beat. Still have no idea why it needs to beep so much.

Then you get discharged, and you’re still surrounded by numbers. At the cardiac rehab, they frequently go around the room and test you and all your geriatric friends' heart rate to make sure you’re being good. If you’re being bad, you get put on the naughty step to calm down. I wish that were a joke.

I was wearing an Apple Watch casually before all this anyway, but since then, I don’t really go a day without it. It has recorded my heartbeat pretty much non-stop since then. Because my heart is so loud, I generally know what my heart rate is all the time. At a cool 60bpm it’s like clockwork, at 180bpm it’s a car engine with a screw loose. And I always know what it is. But it’s also nice to have a cold device tell me what my heart rate is anyway.

In November last year, I had a meeting with one of my cardiologists (I don’t mean to brag that I have multiple, my heart is that much of a problem). I spoke about wanting to run, and I had tried to get information from the cardiac nurses about whether I was allowed to or not. He said that as long as my blood pressure was generally 120/80 or lower. If I do raise it, it should be controlled and rise slowly. Then, sure, why not go for a run? Surprisingly to me, he did not care about my heart rate. Apparently that was never the problem, despite me fixating on it for all god damn year.

So I started recording my blood pressure multiple times a day for about 5 months. I got really fixated on it because I really wanted to run. I wanted to show that if something did go wrong, it wasn’t my blood pressure, or that I wasn’t trying to follow the advice of the specialists. I was trying really hard. And you know what? It was good pretty much every single time I measured it. My blood pressure is the model of average.

There’s been another overarching number, which is more static. The survival rate for people in my cohort is roughly 50% make it to 20 years. A coin flip. Heads you live to 50, tails you don’t.

I have now done 2 years of these years. I kind of imagine from now, I have a guaranteed 18 years left on the planet to do something.

This is where I think my goals will come from. What will I want to have achieved and tried by 2043. How can I enrich my life and have it be as full as I can make it. How can I do as much as possible, have fun, and also enrich others' lives, hopefully. I don’t want to die having not done the things that I can do, or having regrets.

My goal last year was to run. I have smashed that goal. I am running 5k’s a couple of times a week. It is liberating. I signed up for another 10k in a month's time.

So for the last couple of months, I have been thinking about some base goals that I can have over the next 18 years. They aren’t set in stone. They will get added to, or removed. They should be fluid. The only thing we can be sure about is that things will change. And also, a few of them are a bit childish. But whatever, it’s my life.

Be a parent

This is probably my greatest goal. I think I would just be great at it. I have so much energy for this, so much will to be put into something wholly good that it would be the greatest achievement I could have. Leaving a positive mark on someone else’s life permanently, helping shape who they are.

Perform something

The rest of the goals are a bit less formed. When I was a kid growing up, I enjoyed performing. I was part of a local theatre group doing a couple of things, and I rocked the school plays.

I kind of want to experience something like that again, now I am older and I know who I am more. It doesn’t have to be a play or anything like that. Just a performance of some kind. I really don’t know what that looks like right now. All I know is it will be pretty shit, and pretty amazing.

Make something

Years ago, I made a quick online game and put it out onto the internet based on that Pokémon card flipping thing, I forget what it’s called. It kind of sat there for a while, and a couple of years later someone messaged me on Twitter. They said thank you for making the game, and that they had been playing it on the bus during their commute. That rocked.

I want to do that, but for something original. Something which is a part of me, to leave behind. I don’t know what that looks like right now. It could be a game, a book, a movie, or an album. I hope it’s one of those things where it will come into focus as it gets closer. Once it’s in focus, I will know exactly what I want to do.

I just don’t want it to be a fucking website. I am done with making websites.

Get good at something

I have lamented in previous posts that I quite enjoy being bad at things. That is still so true, I am so bad at even the most basic things sometimes. Anyone who has to have a conversation with me knows I can mess up the basics of human interaction.

It would just be kind of nice to be really good at something. I am in my 30s, it’s a “never too late” kind of thing. It would have been easier to get good at something in my teenage years or even early 20s. But if there is a positive trait about myself from the last 2 years to take away, it is that I am persistent. I know I can do something well, so let’s do it.

Like the above though, I don’t quite know /what/ to get good at yet. Just as long as it’s not programming again, I am so done with that. Something creative. Music, painting, art, writing, who knows.

Learn a language properly

This is selfish really. Well, they all are. I just want to actually learn a language properly. It will probably be French. Who can blame me? France is a couple of trains away, and I already know some. I just right now can’t even imagine knowing another language fully enough to be comfortable speaking it and understanding it properly all day. I want to experience that.

Leave it better than I found it

A lot of things suck for a lot of people. At the top, I highlight being a parent as doing positive things for a small group of small people. I kind of want to also have a positive impact on a larger group of people if I can. This feels unrealistic. I have my principles, which I think are good. But the thought of converting socialist and left-leaning views into actions for a group of people is overwhelming in a way that everything else in this list is not. The scope of this will change.

I have spent a lot of the last year being unhappy. I find happiness in a lot of places. But I think if I am to be fulfilled, I need to cultivate it in the places I already am, and enhance the things in my life with that. The goals above don’t really work if they don’t make me happy. I think they will.

Walking

I walk a lot. Most of my exercise is walking, and I go for daily walks. It kind of rocks that my hobby is walking. In the before times, I would sometimes not leave the house for a couple of days. Now, I feel like I need to make the most of my body and day, and keep moving.

There’s a spot in Sheffield I want to mention quickly, which I go by on my walk home from work.

In 2022, I was in my third job of the year, and my first in-person office job since the start of the pandemic. I wanted to make the most of being in town, so after my first day in the office, I decided to walk home.

I figured out the route as I went along. It involves going past the University and hospital, between Crookes Valley Park and the Ponderosa, up the hill towards Walkley, and then down the high street. Once you’ve made it all the way up and across, you start the descent down towards Hillsborough. You'll wind yourself through some houses and a thin path, and then as you go by the allotments on the hill, you have this view.

I was stunned the first time I saw this view. The weather was good, and you could see out into the Peak District, and also simultaneously see my house. I hadn’t really thought before about the closeness of the Peak District until that moment. It felt like it had waited there dormant for me to see it. And now it was noticed and could finally be appreciated.

Ever since then, whenever I am in the office, I always try to walk home. It takes about an hour, but it’s an hour I want to always make time for. As part of the routine, I take a photo in the exact same spot. I have nearly 200 photos taken over the last 3 years. One of my favourite places in the whole world is at the end of someone’s drive. Life is different when you walk through it.

Positively Exhausted

I am often negative in these posts. There is a reality to this, and I don’t know about other survivors of diseases like this, but I think about the negative aspects all the time. It’s just so present every day. It’s also just way easier to talk about the negatives than to enjoy the positives when they happen. You have not lived unless you have written a blog post on the internet about how shit something is. It was basically the whole reason to have a Tumblr.

But my positive takeaway from the last couple of years is that when something needs doing, I get on with doing it. Right from finding out I needed surgery, it was a “let’s do what needs to be done to keep living” mentality. It has changed everything about me.

3 months after the surgery, someone said to me, “If you hadn’t said, I wouldn’t have known you’d had heart surgery”. It’s a weird thing. I don't know if I like that. Why would you know about my heart without me telling you, other than if you heard the ticking (and I have been asked a few times now “What is that ticking noise?”. I love that please don’t hesitate to ask, it is funny) or saw my scarred chest. Overall, I think I play it off well. For whatever it’s worth, I “feel” I look “normal”. It’s a testament to how much I wanted to get through this. Beat it, whatever that means.

But, honestly? I think I have nailed almost dying.

This year I have seen and experienced so much more than in almost all my previous years. Shows, meeting and seeing people new and old, visiting places, just doing so much more. I have even been able to go running around some cities in Europe with a heart that pumps blood through a tube made of recycled t-shirts and Pepsi Max bottles, or something (editors note: he doesn’t know what the artificial aorta is made of).

This has been the positive of the last year. But I am also finding it exhausting. I am tired a lot of the time. Not just because of my physiological disadvantage. I accept the tiredness, because at least I am exhausted for the positive reason of “doing lots”.

There are still plenty of days when breathing is hard, feeling like the pipework inside me has shrunk overnight. Or when my ribs hurt for seemingly no reason. I am not complete, and I really do want a break from it. Some respite, a vacation in the sun. Mainly from the noise. Just for a bit, I would love to live in actual silence. But I can’t, and I won’t ever be able to. So, I will carry on using those bad days to make the good days even better.

The self

In a previous post, I said that I don’t really fear my body anymore. That acceptance, I think, has extended to my whole self. For the first time in my life, I can see the value I have as a person clearly, to myself and others. I’m not sure whether that’s related to the heart, or just getting older. Maybe we all just need time to see how we can fit into the world. I am jealous of those who know their value early.

Sometimes I worry that I ask too much of people and life. At least now, I know I can offer others something of value too, rather than just think I do. So that when I go and do stuff or meet up with someone, I am hopefully making the other side's days brighter too.

A week ago, I did a quick modelling photo shoot of myself with some leftover film. We're talking like "we have 4 minutes spare lets do what we can". I can’t post the images here. Mainly because I don’t need photos of me in my underwear available permanently on the internet. But it’s the first time I have ever done anything like that, and I don’t hate the result. I don't hate me. Which feels strange. Maybe I'll start doing life modelling (this is a joke).

Also, I even have a moustache now. Still undecided on whether I keep it. But while I am here, it's also just nice to have fun with your body for once. You know?

2 years

A thing I wanted to get out of year 2 was to be more positive. I lack purpose still. There has not been a revelation yet. I am just as naive and stupid as before. It has been a much more positive year. There is no better evidence of that truth than I have struggled to write this post for months, because the things I have to complain about are much more minor than my year 1 complaints. It’s hard to find something still worth writing about after writing about coming up with contingency plans to kill myself if something like this happened again.

You know, I did flip that coin a few months ago, when I first started thinking about being 2 years in. It landed on tails.

It is day 731. The pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

I relish being bad at things. It is something I have repeated ad nauseam here and to everyone around me. To me, there is nothing more human and personal than just trying something. I have also been embracing “being cringe” for similar reasons.

I wanted to make a post about the idea of perfection, taking you through 3 examples from my life where I think I learnt something about mistakes and being imperfect (although I have many other examples), then I kind of go off on one and rant about AI.

I spent a lot of time on online forums growing up. I wouldn’t say I was a particularly lonely child or teenager, but I found “my community” in the weird, online text-based spaces of the 00s and 10s. The ability to find like-minded people that you enjoy talking to, somewhere, anywhere, was a unique aspect of the internet.

The website which ended up being my home was the Facepunch forums. I have mentioned the site before, because it was a huge part of my life. From the ages of 13 to 19, I posted there probably every single day. A haven waiting for me every day through a glowing screen in a dark room.

But there’s something that bothered me for almost the entire time I posted on the website. It was my username. On the internet, I go by the name “Icemaz”, and it used to always be capitalised like that. In my haste to post on the “official Garry’s Mod forum” (of all places, it is amusing that I found a community there), as I did at 13, I entered my username as “icemaz”.

A decade later, I lamented this to someone else in the community. I said I would have preferred my username to start with a capital letter. It’s stupid, it’s vain, it is completely meaningless, but it was just a silly mistake I made years prior that I had carried with me the entire time.

They told me that it being lowercase was cooler anyway. My name was perfect as it was.

My partner and I went to some art classes at the end of last year at a local art gallery in town. Each week, there was a different artist we would look at and try to replicate their styles using their techniques. I would recommend finding something like that near you if you can. Sometimes, when doing art or any hobby like it, you need to have time set aside for you to go out and do it. Paying some money to get a space in a class ties your hands in making space for it.

So we went along and tried the techniques of various artists. But achieving the result of something that looked like a Turner or a tempera by Botticelli felt unobtainable. I will never be skilled enough at anything I do to create that level of work.

On one of the weeks, we looked at the watercolour works of French Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. The pieces picked out for us were intentionally basic. Or at least, that’s how they looked. You could see the draft lines left in the picture, moving in waves over the objects, explaining how the piece evolved. The colours were not necessarily realistic, but internally consistent with each other, and replicable with any cheap watercolour set you could buy. The pieces felt imperfect and obtainable by anyone who had the time to try. It felt like art designed for ordinary people.

I love taking photos. Ever since I got my first camera around the age of 6 (a big plastic colourful Fisher-Price device designed to be thrown around by children), I have had one with me all the time. Today, this normally just means my iPhone, which, to be fair, does take great photos. But I often travel around with my Minolta analog camera and take photos of whatever I feel like. A lot of buildings, as you've seen in previous posts, and sometimes people. This year alone, I have taken around 1000 film photos.

Analog photos speak to me in a lot of ways. Aesthetically, I like the colours they produce. I enjoy both how forgiving and extremely unfair it can be in different lighting. I appreciate that if you want to, you can process it with a computer later. But if you decide to leave it mostly raw, they can still look great. I think most of all, I like that the end product is something real. You are performing a chemical process on a piece of coated plastic, which results in a physical thing you can hold. You don’t get a redo after you press the shutter. You can’t delete a photo; the moment in time has already been stored in a sea of chemicals. If the photo was wrong, you won’t know until days later when you develop those chemicals into something usable. And even if you did know, you would have to spend another one of the 36 photos in your roll.

I want to keep taking this further and purposely make my photos look objectively bad. This sounds like a shitty cop out for just taking bad photos. I suppose it is in a way. But I earnestly believe that an imperfect photo, slightly out of focus, or overexposed, tells more of a story than one which is sharp as a pin, with a well-lit subject, and had billions of CPU cycles spent making it look right.

This month, I have 2 of my photos up in the Art House gallery in Sheffield. It’s their summer open exhibition where you can submit any art for display. Despite paying for my entry and getting it all framed and printed nicely, I worry that my photos aren’t worthy of being on display. But more than that, I worry that people won’t think it’s “real”. I feel a bit silly for worrying about that. The photos are purposefully not edited, and honestly could do with at least cropping. On a technical level, they could just be done better. I thought about performatively proving it was real by slipping the negatives into the frame, to be displayed alongside it to say, “hey, this is what it looked like out of the camera”. But that felt a bit wanky.

If you get a chance to, go along and have a look at all the wonderful art people have made for you. And most importantly, go see my photos.

Something I think we are losing in the new digital age is the embracing of imperfection. When I think of all the things I enjoy doing the most, I am not even great at any of them, let alone close to perfect. From playing guitar and piano, to writing this blog, or going for a run, I would have so much further to go to achieve perfection, and I would go as far as to say that I will never be perfect at anything in my life. Everything about me is imperfect. But I love being bad at the things I do; it is what makes them enjoyable.

As the age of AI and LLMs is thrust upon us, one thing I am getting bored with is the idea of achieving perfection. These mathematical structures are burning the planet just to try and make something that fulfils some morally bankrupt executive's idea of perfection, whether it’s a whole perfect book, or create a whole perfect image as if it were real. I think this is bad.

I have been radicalised these last couple of years on the importance of real people doing real things. I am sure I have been fooled by some AI content that was passed as being human-made. I know I have been. But I feel there is more to something than its simply existing. A kind of soul is left behind in the work created by a real person. It’s not something you can detect; it is mostly bullshit. But, if you could detect it, I think it lies in our willingness to be imperfect and produce art and words with flaws. To be flawed is the most perfect thing a thing can be.

Over the last couple of years, I have read quite a few books. Way more than I had read before, as I was a perennial non-reader. Among them are what people consider “classics”. James Joyce, Stephen King, etc. The thing I am getting the most from those books is the human-ness of what is written. There are frequently parts that I think are clunky. Sentences that are about form over fulfilling a function of the story. I haven’t yet seen an LLM produce a result which I find convincingly human in the same way. It frequently gets things wrong, and it produces things that are realistic for sure. But they’re producing copy-paste emails from customer support, not the next Annie Ernaux.

This generation of AI/LLMs will never be imaginative, despite what we are told. They are constrained by their design to be predictable and perfect; to follow exact patterns as told.

Then there is image generation. I cannot for the life of me come up with a good reason why we need this. And even if we did, why do we need it to produce results in such high fidelity? There is the obvious “democratising art so anyone can now create masterpieces” argument chuds use. Congrats, you can now make a copy of the Mona Lisa with Bart Simpson's face. Or “it allows us to test things out before we go to market with a campaign”.

If you spend longer than 5 seconds thinking about it, high fidelity photo generation of real people or places will only ever be used to deceive or blackmail people. You could make the most incredible image generator that creates perfect photo-realistic JPEGs of whatever you want and uses no power to do it. And it will be used by people to lie for political gain, to harass women, or just generally be a weirdo. I honestly do not think there is another end goal here. Allowing a marketing team to make their next campaign in a day instead of a week is not worth the trade-off. The companies developing it are designing it purposefully for it to be a tool for fascism. Perfection for them is being able to photo-realistically create an image of someone doing something compromising, and also make it so we can no longer trust any of the other images we see. We should not allow perfection.

I am also a hypocrite in these matters. I work as a software developer, and in my day job, I use generative AI trained on random code from GitHub to make the work I do quicker and easier. And I would be lying if I said that the core tech behind these models wasn’t neat. It is cool. But it is the ultimate capitalist Pandora's box, which I don’t think we can close anymore. AI might make my job easier now, and it will probably replace my job in the future. Who knows. Eventually, whether it looks like ChatGPT or not, something will replace me. And I won’t lie, part of me wishes for this replacement to happen. We could be filling our days with the joy of others and human creativity, instead of sitting at a computer for 8 hours a day.

But when everyone’s job is replaced, and the profit line goes up at a record pace, I think the reality is that there will not be the enlightenment of a wonderful, fulfilled life. Where the amount we work has been reduced down to just the necessities, and we can all partake in keeping society working at leisure. Instead, it will be a boring dystopia designed by a few men in high castles, designing what we do, see, and think.

They aren’t building these tools to help you. They never were. They don’t care about you at all. They are building these things to replace you. To make you even more meaningless in their machines than you already are.

We shouldn’t let them. We should be imperfect.

I have a few posts in my backlog like this, which I might start slowly posting. I only really like talking about myself (read big ego), but I have been thinking a lot about LLMs recently at work and outside of it, so I wanted to write some thoughts down. Maybe my thoughts will change in time, or I will be able to come back to this with a more concrete argument or viewpoint than I did here. I just wanted to post something.

And yeah, it is an Oasis lyric in the title.

It is a weird thing to realise that you have been afraid for a long while, without the usual feelings of constant fear. It isn't the same feeling as being on the edge of a cliff, or standing in the middle of a busy road. It feels kind of normal.

There is a quote from Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring which I think describes the feeling:

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

He probably says it in the movie too. It is a bloody good quote.

I am going to talk about some fears I have had over the last couple of years, and then finish with something I no longer fear. It is probably too personal, but at this point, I say fuck it, let’s just go all in.

This year has been busy. Probably more so than at any other year in my life so far. I have had this continuous need and desire to always be doing something. I spoke last year about the silence that exists everywhere after a major life change. This year, I think I have been doing so much that there hasn’t even been time to notice that there has been background white noise all along. No time to rot, no time to notice.

When I get into it, I think I am terrified of fading away into nothing. That if I don’t make the most of the time I have, if I don’t do more, then it would have been for nothing. I’m not sure what the "it" is in that. Maybe life, maybe life after death, maybe the time of the people who saved me, or the time of everyone else.

I am haunted by the fact that I almost died, and it would all just end, the lights would go out and everything I’ve known, seen, or loved, would fade into nothing. God knows I bring it up all the time with everyone. Having heart problems has become me. So it’s not just that I fear I could fade into nothing. It’s that even if I don’t, and I keep on going and moving, I will still transition into a different person no matter what.

I sold a lot of my stuff on eBay recently. My brain has been nagging at me to get rid of a lot of it for a couple of years now, so it wasn’t made out of a split-second decision. I have felt this need to reduce and simplify the things around me.

Pretty much everything that’s gone is of no real importance. It just...I don’t know if it’s true for you too, but over the years I have accumulated quite a lot of what I will call “stuff”. Random pieces of you. Video games, toys, clothes, tech, books, photos, paper. “Stuff”. So, when we decided to have some work done in the attic office room and everything needed clearing out, it felt like there would be no better time than now. Most of it had lived in boxes or away in a drawer untouched for years anyway.

“The things we have are made to be used” is an ideal I try to live by. It is one of the strongest held beliefs I have, which is funny if you look at how much stuff I own that I don’t use. It is something I believe can be applied to almost everything that makes you, you. The things you own. The skills you possess. Your personality and experience. Your body. To keep these things to yourself, or to leave them unused feels like a misuse of them. Why own a games console you never use? Why keep clothes you are never going to wear? Why have a body if you’re not going to use it?

I am writing this in an intentionally dour and hyperbolic way. The long and short of it is I wanted to boil down myself, and my belongings, to just the things I want to keep. Hopefully, I will use them. All of this is with the view that maybe one day, I can reduce it further to just the things I need rather than want. The things I got rid of weren't serving me or their purpose.

I get scared that like the heart problems, the things I leave behind will be the things that people will remember me for. I can’t imagine anything worse than someone going through my stuff after I die and going “He did love his GameBoy!”. I don’t feel connected to it. I want my legacy to mean more than plastic in a landfill and platitudes of my life post-heart surgery.

Something I want more than anything is to be a parent. Before everything happened, it was an “it’ll happen soon when we are ready”. But I was given 3 weeks from getting married to having heart problems. There was no time to make plans. Barely enough time to finish the leftover cake. I have this fear that with the bad luck that has already happened in the last 2 years, I will just have this one last piece to top it off, and I will never get the opportunity to be a parent. I feel like we shouldn’t have waited. But we could also never have known what would happen. And who knows, it might never have been any different with that extra 6 months of trying.

Part of why I kept a lot of the stuff was so that in the future, I could share it with somebody new. Brand new fresh eyes straight out of the box, getting a glance on how I used to live, the things I was into. Someone to share myself with. But with that idea becoming distant, so too does the meaning of “stuff”.

I fear that if it doesn’t happen, I will never decide to stop.

There was a moment a few months ago when I realised I couldn’t remember someone’s name who I had spoken to frequently for years. That the random knowledge retrieval embedded in everyone’s brains was just breaking down in front of me. It’s funny how you don’t realise you have forgotten something like that until you’re already in the situation of having to remember their name. There is no on-demand error correction.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I then forgot my colleague's name that I realised this might be a problem. It all kind of spiralled out from there. I have spoken to the doctor about my memory, but they were unconcerned. I also wrote about my memory last year. In that post, I said it was getting better. In reality, I think it’s got so much worse that it’s going to start to become a problem if it keeps on going.

As part of trying to always be busy, I have been to quite a few gigs this year. Bands I have listened to for years, I am unable to recall their lyrics off the top of my head, which never used to be a problem. The hand reaches into my brain to rummage around the bag of words, and it comes back empty.

It’s just so different from how it used to be. If it was always like this I don’t think I would mind. I used to be able to remember conversations I had years ago. Now I forget something important you just said to me. I was looking at your face and lips, and I still forgot it 30 seconds after you said it. The only chance I have is to go away after the conversation and repeat it over to myself. Sometimes I forget what I said as I’m talking which is harrowing. I start off making a point or relaying a story, and completely lose track of where I am.

Maybe it’s aging. “He’s just getting old!”. But this doesn’t feel like what someone describes as “being forgetful” as you get older. If it is, then I don’t know how we have got this far.

I don’t know what I will do if it keeps getting worse.

I have a fear about this blog. I write some poorly thought out and hastily written posts about my personal life and then post them on the internet. I share them with the people I know from all areas of my life because, for some reason in my new mindset, I like sharing everything about myself with you.

I fear that it makes people think less of me because they know my flaws in greater detail than my strength. I am a good person, and I contain multitudes. But you read these posts and I am a whiny asshole. All I do is talk about depressing stuff and repeat myself over and over about my heart surgery.

There is this weird knowledge that you may have read this, while I know very little about you. This is rarely the case. Plenty of people have been kind enough to share themselves with me and be as honest as I think I am. But occasionally it will come up with someone I know nothing about, and I just have to sit there knowing you have read a blog post about my memory issues and how much I wish I smoked.

Writing these posts is something I enjoy. It's unfortunate I need to keep getting over the fear of its existence every time I decide to publish one. It has become a vital part of my drawn-out healing process, where my physical body is as good as it’s going to get, but my mind has a long way to go.

I will always recommend that you do this if you feel like there are things on your mind that you just want to talk about. Whether it’s in a public blog, a private journal, or just a message you send someone, you should do it. My door is always open, as are the doors of all your loved ones.

Catharsis can be found in solidifying words that describe how we’re getting on. I am just trying to ignore the fear I have of putting it publicly on the internet. And hey, there are a lot of things I write that I never publish. Imagine how whiny the posts are which I’m not willing to share with even the people I hold closest. But even those, every word of those texts still gives me something worthwhile.

This should be rounded out by talking about something I no longer fear: my body.

It’s a strange one. As a nerdy, awkward teenager the one thing I hated most in the world other than just myself was my body. I hated how it looked, I hated how it acted, I could see nothing good in it.

Despite now having a torso covered in scars big and small, it isn’t even something that crosses my mind anymore. Maybe it’s the prolonged sessions spent being watched over and poked by medical professionals, or maybe it’s just getting older, but I just don’t care at all anymore.

I remember a few years ago being embarrassed to get into my trunks and go swimming in a Peak District plunge pool with a friend. A few months ago I spent 4 hours at a spa with my body's skin on display, scars and all, with no issue.

It’s funny sometimes how things work out. If anything, I am grateful for my body in a lot of ways. If my heart had never exploded, I would never have had the gusto to be a better person, and I would never have gone out of my way to talk to new people, and understand the old ones better.

We become different people.

Today, I read “Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling.” It’s a collection of 10-to 20-page essays on what cycling means to or has done for the writer. I quite liked it. If you see it in the bookshop, give it a pick up. The essays are very casual, but they’re a perfect read for an hour or two in the sun. We should be more introspective about the things we have in life. If we’ve been out for lunch or a drink, you know I am an oversharer, annoyingly comfortable talking about myself. But I actually want to spend most of my time asking you questions, to learn about you. You are great. This book was nice because it was a group of people sharing something personal with me.

It inspired me to write a blog post about cycling.

I am a meticulous researcher when it comes to big purchases. In the year leading up to July 2023, I spent many evenings looking up articles and videos on various bikes. A year before that, I decided I was done being completely reliant on public transport in Sheffield and wanted to make the transition to being mostly dependent upon it instead.

To make it worth the expense, I have to obsess over the details, it has to be perfect. Or at least, whatever I find has to nearly match the arbitrary criteria that I set for it. Living in Sheffield, this was an ebike with a ton of power to get up the hills, folding to fit in the work elevator and our shed, and of course being cool. It never does match perfectly. Eventually, my brain (and wallet) will gave in, impatience and desire for the “thing” outweighing the most annoying of life’s constants, time spent living where I don't have the "thing".

So it was, on July 12th, 2023, I put 900 of my best pounds through the tubes on eBay, and ordered a second-hand Tern Vektron P9 in bright orange. It was the other side of Stoke-on-Trent (hallowed grounds from my University years) in Market Drayton. But that weekend, my partner and I got a train from Sheffield to Stoke, and then a taxi to Market Drayton to go pick up this bike I had spent a year waiting for.

I don’t know if it’s a common thing to remember, but I remember the first time I rode a bike. Well, I say rode. I actually mean “rolling down a slight gradient without falling over”, which felt like a huge achievement. Most things probably do as a 3-year-old, achieving life firsts every week. We were living in Scotland, in the middle of nowhere, near a village called Insch in Aberdeenshire. Our house had a fairly big garden and driveway with a slight downward gradient. Whilst my brother was probably off doing sick tricks with the 4 years extra experience with bikes, I rolled myself down from the edge of the garage to the other side of the drive. I managed to stay upright the whole way, and I can only imagine the pop-off and celebration went wild. I did this same 10-meter journey over and over, until eventually I also learnt that you also need to pedal to keep going.

We told the taxi to wait around for 10 minutes at a local shop, and that we would be right back with the bike. My navigation skills are pretty good, but I should definitely have given a bit more leeway to the timings. We ended up /walking quickly/ around the town, trying to find this guy's house. Eventually, we get there, I knock on the door, and the transaction is underway.

The seller was an older guy, must be in his 60s or 70s, and he had looked after this bike incredibly. Everything is there, all the manuals have been put into a binder, every wire and accessory is included and placed into the pannier bag included with the bike. Aware of time stumbling away from us, I quickly check out the bike, say “yes please”, and we’re on our way down the road with this rad new bike.

We make it back to the taxi, some 25-30 minutes later. Bless his soul, he waited for us, and didn’t ask for any extra money either. We shove the folded bike into the boot, where it just about fits. On the way back, he jokingly asks if my partner and I had a falling out because we weren’t talking to each other like we had on the way there. In truth, I just wasn’t feeling that great. I hadn’t been for a couple of months.

Like most kids growing up in the UK, my bike was a cornerstone of childhood. Going to a friend’s house on the estate? Forget walking, I have a bike. Meeting up at the park? Okay, cool, bring the bike and leave it on the ground whilst you play. Feeling sad? Awesome, go for a bike ride around the local streets looking sad. Pretty much any occasion you were going somewhere or leaving the house, you would go on your bike.

There is this one time I specifically remember when I was 11 or so. By this point, we had moved around a few times and had settled down near Cambridge on a typical UK millennium estate. You know the ones. All the houses are made with red bricks, there are no walking paths, and for some reason, all the roads are curvy with no straight tracks to any house, it has to look fancy on the map too. We hate grids in England.

We lived up the hill of the estate, and down the other end was that bit where they "gave up". When they were developing the area, there was probably a bit too much water from a local river to deal with. So they leave it as grass, make a big hole, plant a few trees to make it look natural. It was also the steepest hill anywhere close to the house.

So on a cold November evening whilst the heavens shat down upon us, my friend and I decided to cycle, at speed, down this grass-y, nothing hill. You know that feeling when something seems like a good idea, but the moment it begins, you realise it was a bad one. The moment the wheels touched that grass, dirt started to be flung up by the wheels of my bike and straight into my face. We had skimped on getting mudguards. I tried to slow down, but the ground was too wet to do it safely. So I rode it out, all the way to the bottom until I naturally came to a halt.

Shocked at the consequences of my actions, I cycled back up the hill. I walked back into the house, covered head to toe in brown sludge, and slinked straight into the bathroom to strip as much of the evidence off my body as possible.

A train, a tram, and a walk up a hill, we eventually got the folding bike back home. Immediately, I was a bit obsessed with it. I hadn’t owned a bike in a decade by this point, and the mounting excitement of a year had my mind running like crazy. The bike got its MOT from a local shop, and after a few shorter rides on local roads to get comfortable, I took my wee folding city bike out to the Peak District near me. A beautiful sunny day, up and down some green hills. It was perfect. It felt like everything I had wanted out of it.

For the next month, I used my bike to get to the office whenever I was in. My workplace's office elevator fits maybe two people uncomfortably, so the folding bike was worth its weight in gold. It sounds stupid to say, but I get stunned at how we have made something seemingly so simple (e.g., a bike that folds) work so well. Then, on August 29th, I took it home for the last time. The next morning, I got the call about having urgent heart surgery. I laughed and joked with the person delivering the news that it can’t have been that serious, I was cycling to and from work the day before! He replied completely seriously, “Oh, well, don’t do that. Please just get a taxi.”. I should probably stop joking whenever I have to deal with something serious.

Once I had left home at 19 for University, bikes played basically no part in my life until I got that folding bike. I only rode a bike one more time, when I met up with my elder brother and younger sister in London. We’re not a particularly close family. I blame our upbringing, but in reality, we have ourselves to blame as well. We made a specific effort for some reason to meet up that day. I can’t remember the details of what we got up to very well, my memory unfortunately has begun to fail me a lot quicker than it should thanks to my surgeries. But at some point over the day, we hired some of the Boris bikes, and we cycled over Hyde Park.

It might have only filled up 20 minutes of a slightly weird day, trying to pretend to be a functioning family. But I find when you’re on a bike, the day fades around you. It is pure and joyous, even when you’re commuting. You focus on what’s ahead, and you end up smiling. In the Peak District it's open roads and hills. In Hyde Park, it is groups of people walking incredibly slowly, stumbling all over the path, apparently trying to get hit by bikes.

Doing it with my siblings mattered too. My brother was there when I learnt to balance on a bike for that first time, riding around the garden himself on his Sonic the Hedgehog BMX. I remember my little sister learning to ride her pink bike on the patio in the back garden. We don’t share much between us, but when one of us is gone, we can still share those moments.

3 months after my aortic dissection surgery, I sold my folding bike. I was scared of it. During one of my post-surgery complication episodes, when I stayed in the hospital, a cardiac consultant had a serious word with me. It was probably the first time someone had been directly honest about my condition. I get it, you don’t want to tell the crying 29-year-old his life is over. But in his wee speech, he mentioned that bike I had, don’t ride it uphill. He knew what he was saying, knowing that we both live in Sheffield. When I got home, I looked at it sat there in the corner of the dining room. I hate it when things end up not getting used. Not getting loved.

An eBay listing later, a local couple in their mid-60s came to pick it up. The bikes I like trend positively with the elderly. They were looking to have an e-bike for their caravanning holidays. The bike impressed during its test ride as I knew it would, and they were happy with the condition and accessories. Offhandedly, the topic of why I was selling it came up. I told them my story. They turned around, “Huh, was this at the Northern General in Sheffield?”.

“Yeah, it was.”

“Oh! That is interesting, our son is a cardiac nurse on the Chesterman ward.”

“That’s where I was, that’s a crazy coincidence!”

That is not how the conversation went. I did mention I have memory issues. That coincidence didn’t affect me for a few weeks. Then I remembered it on a daily walk, how everything has felt both incredibly close and connected, and incredibly lonely. I burst into tears. That happens a lot.

A year later, towards the end of 2024, I decided to get another bike. Through a wonderful scheme through work, it was almost the highest tech bike I could get. With the biggest motor, a frame small enough to fit in the shed, and a cargo space to occasionally take the dog places on the back, it was perfect for my situation now. It has taken me about 6 months since then to want to actually use the bike. Being told you will be putting yourself in danger if you cycle a bike uphill doesn’t shake off easily. But at some point, the hard work I have put into being better has to make a dent in the fears I have.

I am scared every day of so many things. But last week I went out into the Peak District twice, and just had a wonderful time. The hills don’t feel like anything when you’re on them, and the flats feel like a good bit of normal exercise. Ebikes are kind of amazing.

I wrote some stuff about my new bike here at the end, and it started sounding like a review of the bike. But I think the bike itself is irrelevant. It could be any bike. In reality, it could be anything. To me, it is a bike, and the bike represents some freedom, and I associate it with a pure kind of childlike fun. It’s a slice of nostalgia from growing up that I can experience every single day. It makes me happy every single rotation of the pedals. A bike is something so pure in function and form that I wanted to share it with you now in this blog post. I have so many more things to share with you, with others, with no one.

The tree lurched from another strike. Nearly there. The aggression of the last couple of minutes had left him short of breath, so he took a long breath in and out and stepped back.

He figured 2 more hits, and it would be down. The tree would supply enough logs for at least a couple of weeks. Up here on the edge of the tree line you could only find alpine pines, but it was enough for his modest needs of warmth. It hadn’t been his choice to live here. But if he was going to be forced to live here, he was going to be warm.

Another swing, the tree whimpered. One more will do it. Bring it down. Taking a step back, he took in as deep a breath as he could. It wasn’t high enough here to need equipment to get air, but it still felt like breathing through a straw. The pipelines that made up his respiratory system felt like they had been rebuilt with tubes half the size they should have been. Everything was harder than it should be. The snow that covered the ground didn’t help either.

One more swing. Somebody more able would have been able to have the tree down sooner, but it was only him here.

The fire crackled in the background as he worked on something. It didn’t matter what, only that something was being worked, and it filled the silence. He looked up out the window. The wind was howling past, but luckily no extra snow. He wasn’t sure how high up the small lodge he was in was, just that it was high enough for it to take its toll.

A few more hours of daylight, and there was still real work to be done. A sigh of resignation. Tiredness was already setting in for the day. The wind had quietened down now since he had started his work inside, but it still didn’t feel good. He looked at his phone. -2 degrees, “feels like -9”.

The fruit and berries didn’t grow quite as high up as the lodge, so the gathering involved a trip down the mountain. This was always the easy bit, and enjoyable. It was rare that he took the time to look away from the mountain further up. When you’re going down, you had no choice. Moments like this were relished.

A bag full of as much nutrition as he could carry, he checked how long he had and started the climb. Since the incident this was the bit he least looked forward to. Before then, he had only experienced altitude a couple of times willingly on the side of a mountain. Now it was his permanent home, the novelty was non-existent. He rubbed his hand up and down the centre of his chest gently remembering where they had entered him, and begun the climb.

Progress on today’s climb started off well. The weather had cleared nicely, the snow was not as deep as it had been on previous climbs. Ultimately his body still felt like an average humans. But no extra thought was needed to remind him of the additional thumping in his chest. Quicker and louder than before. When he got put on the mountain he was told to keep the tick in check. “You are now a useless 29 year old”, the surgeon said. He wished now that he had used his body for more while he could. Following instructions was unfortunately not his strong suit.

Half way there. Some thoughts came in of life before the mountain. How easy things felt. The thought that hiking would be a hobby, a fun afternoon, was alien now. He remembered times when he would go for hikes for fun. Even thinking of these thoughts was exhausting, almost forcing the air from his lungs. That didn’t matter though. Barely any air would make it back in. It was tiring to exist. To think. But. The mountain needed to be climbed.

The sun was quickly setting. But there was still plenty of time. An animal darted into cover ahead, leaving a trail of prints in the snow. He had learnt quickly that he would not be able to keep up with animals. No straining, and catching an alpine animal was beyond his capabilities. No matter, berries and fruit would do.

He reached the door to his lodge. There was still some 30 minutes of usable light. No idea why he had decided to rush. There was no reason for it in the end. But he had. His body felt fine, legs and feet never ached. But everything in his heart and lungs had told him he should have slowed down. Another journey out of breath. An overdose of will unfortunately would not overcome his malfunction.

The fire was still burning weakly, but a few logs extra and it was good for the night. Some time sat down, his heart had relaxed and the concerns had too. Things are generally always scariest when they are at their loudest. And the heart was loud.

A mouthful of the mountains offerings, some evening medication, and the quietness of the evening settled as it did each day. During the daylight, work and the world felt loud. Creatures would call. People would talk on the devices. When the silence of the mountain settled in each evening, and the ticking echoed, that was when it was at its hardest. He reached over and started some work. White noise was white noise, and at least there was wifi on the mountain. Plus, checking out what others were doing was a bit of a highlight in the isolation. The air was thin, but there was still a life. And most of the things he was good at before he could be good at now.

After the couple of years, he didn’t think he would be let off the mountain now. The mountain was becoming home. The hope that things could return to normal, and he could leave the lodge was gone. But after all this time, that would be okay. The hope now is that one day he could thrive amongst the pines.

The wind started to pick up outside. His senses had felt that it would be bad snow for the next few days. Not every day could work out, there would be bad days too. It felt scary, but nothing short of death would end that fear. He waited for the next day to begin.

Today it is 2 years since my aortic dissection actually happened. If you've seen me in the last couple of years, you'll know that sometimes I have "bad heart" days. These are days when breathing feels difficult. That climbing the stairs feels a dozen times harder than it did the day before. I don't know why that is, apparently it's normal, but it kind of reminds me of being up a mountain in the thin air. Hence the post.

I don't think I've ever written down initial event was like. I guess because the main big thing happened 4 months later after I was actually diagnosed.

I stretched in bed, that kind of cat like stretch (you know the stretch I mean, they feel great in the morning). In doing this, I felt an intense tearing pain in my chest, right in my heart, and extending up my neck to behind my nose. The most painful pain I have ever felt in my life. Like being shot in the chest. It started to subside pretty quickly, but I was shocked, and my body just wasn't right. I texted my wife that I needed help, she came up, we called 111. They advised us to go to the walk-in centre, so I did.

As we're talking on the phone, I'm noticing that I have a patch of blindness slowly expanding in my vision. It looked the same as an ocular migraine, but all encompassing. A void in my sight. When we got the Uber to the walk in centre, it had expanded from a 50p at arms length to a plate size at arms length. I get registered, they think it's probably drugs so I get placed low on the triage list. I see someone, and by this point I feel like I can't see anymore. I am repeatedly apologising to this doctor who is seeing me, because he is asking me questions that I simply can't find answers to in my brain. I am not functioning. They send me back to my seat.

From there I have fragments of memories for 24 hours. The feeling of rain on my body (which I now know was them putting me into am ambulance). Being wheeled around the hospital, and me pretending I was an F1 driver. Breathing in for the chest x-ray. Begging them to fix my sight because I was still blind. Trying to eat sandwiches blind, but ultimately messing it up and just eating the cheese.

Then suddenly, my body works. I can see again. It's 7 or 8am the next day. I don't know what has happened to me. My wife has been with me all night, and looks concerned because apparently I've been claiming to be able to see for hours despite failing every test.

Two doctors come in to my bay in the acute ward of the hospital I am in. They make my wife stand outside. They ask me what drugs I have taken, a presumption of guilt. Me being my naive self said "ibuprofen", because I had about 30 minutes before this began. They scoff, make me do another urine test, which they lose, and discharge me.

Later that day, I start to have trouble breathing. My upper chest is in immense pain, like I have been hit with a sledgehammer and it's starting to bruise. This pain continues for a few weeks, I go back to A&E with a racing heart rate of ~160bpm and a peak of 220bpm. They do nothing, and claim it's anxiety.

That takes the story up to the surgery as described in my initial blog post about it. I kind of just wanted to write this down because it wasn't anywhere on here, and amongst the memory issues of the last couple of years, it was the border point between being normal, and not.

When this initially happened, I had been married for 3 weeks and was 2 weeks from my honeymoon. I am on that honeymoon now, 2 years later. I am writing this while currently at a hotel in Milan, with the last couple of days ahead of us before we go home. What's funny is tomorrow we're going over the Swiss alps. I am trying to thrive, even on the mountain.

It is currently the 5th of April 2025. I am sitting in bed at my hotel in Prague, with my laptop out after a week of roaming the streets of Europe. I have another two weeks of it ahead of me. This is being written after having read some pages of “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I am not that far into it. It seems complicated. But it’s important to mention so you know I read books, and it has nothing to do with the following post.

As a kid, from the ages of around 6 to 10, we used to go on holiday in France with what I feel like an odd regularity. Maybe I am misremembering it, but I think there are only so many times a childhood should have memories of being in a tent in France whilst some form of extreme weather occurred outside. I suppose for a white British middle-class family living on the English south coast, it was only a short ferry across the pond. And it was technically a foreign destination.

I remember, in the way one remembers childhood^[1], a specific summer in the early 2000’s we went to France. I think we went camping somewhere for a week during the height of summer. I don’t know where exactly, my geography wasn’t that great as an ~8 year old. I remember it being intensely hot and dry, feeling the dead yellow grass beneath my bare feet, and the heat distorting the air around anything which could radiate it back.

One day we went to a miniature Lego town nearby. Not an official one, mind you. The true Lego-heads amongst you know there is no official Lego Parc in France. We rolled up in what I think was our ridiculously huge Hyundai Trajet^[2]. This behemoth of a 7-person people carrier, which was carrying either a 4-person family pre my sister’s birth, or at the absolute most a 5-person family where one of them was literally a baby. You could re-arrange the seats, and even set it up into a “picnic” configuration where the middle seats turned into tables. We did that once. It truly was Homer’s car.

We wondered the hallowed plastic grounds of this barely adequate simulacrum of a French town when the weather had decided it was going to turn in the way it often does in our memories. The sky blackened, the noise level of summer muted, and we made our way back to the car before it would be too late^[3]. We made it, huddled into the car, and started back to the campsite, just as the sky was coming down.

With the heavens open, my parents considered the day ruined. They didn’t need another reason to argue, but they would take everyone which came anyway. As we’re making our way back to the campsite, all of a sudden, there’s this bright flash of lightning ahead of us on the road. It feels like it happened 10 feet away, but I am confident now it was hundreds of meters down the road. At the time, this probably felt like the closest I would come in my life to seeing death until it eventually arrived.

Now I am writing this on the 7th of April. We’re on an overnight sleeper train on our way to Rome. It’s pretty neat, we paid for the nicest room we could on it and I would definitely do it again. This one has a little seat and table which I am writing this on as the night obscured world passes by unknown. We will see how the breakfast is.

This French weather based fiasco probably snowballed and ended up with us returning home early. I don’t really remember. An unfortunate side effect of being just a stone’s throw from a ferry was we were a stone’s throw from being able to leave whenever we wanted.

We would come back in our huge, slab of a people carrier^[4], with the aerodynamics of a brick, absolutely covered in bugs from the continents countryside. This thing was a veritable bug decimator with how caked it would get.

It would be my and my brother’s job to occasionally wash the cars over the summer. I can remember the feeling of the cheap yellow sponge in my hand. Dipping it into the warm soapy water with some cheap cleaning product in it. The heavy black bucket which was dragged along the floor to the car. That feeling of having to scrub and scrub to try and get these dried insects off the front bumper and windshield. Literally a defining part of my childhood in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was getting those crusty bugs off my Dad’s car.

My wife purchased her first car last year. We’ve not taken it to France or anything further affield than East Anglia. Nor driven it through the country fields of the south of England. And while it isn't a sports car or anything, it is far more aerodynamic than a literal shed on wheels. But I have noticed that you just don’t get bugs splattered on it at all. If you Google around, it turns out it’s a real thing called the “Windshield phenomenon”. There's been real studies on this that showed yeah, the bugs have been leaving.

I hope one day, I get to have children. And listen, I want to make clear I am not saying the children yearn for the free labour of cleaning their parent’s car. But I do find it fascinating that this one really specific part of my childhood about cleaning bugs off a car won’t be, can't be, replicated.

For some people around my age, they can probably remember a time before the internet. This will be distinct from their children who have grown up surrounded by it. I personally do not remember a time before the internet. My Dad was an early adopter of Al Gore’s World Wide Web. From the mid to late 90’s we had dial-up and computers in the house. I grew up with this, and I can be fairly confident that anyone I am a father to will as well. We will have that in common, even if the method of internet consumption is different. The distinction I will be thinking of is cleaning the car on a hot summers day.

There are times when I sit there and think not much time has passed in the 30 years I have been lucky enough to survive on this Earth. Times I still feel like I am a teenager, wanting to do whatever I want. But then there are those times which ground me, show me how much time has passed and that I should get a grip. I think looking at the front bumpers of cars last year did that. If in the time I have been alive, we have managed to destroy and entire ecosystem of insects to the point of having a noticeable drop in the number of splatters against a car bumper, what else has fucking changed man.

What happened to all the bugs?

In 2013, I was a jobless 19 year old with no plan. To fill the days, I was regularly volunteering at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. It was a smaller charity at the time, but it still had loads of people donating all sorts of computing hardware and software. We accumulate all sorts of random stuff over our lives, and I think most people don’t want it to end up in a landfill. So whether it’s just an attic clear out, or the belongings of someone who had passed away, it could always be donated to the museum. I would spend some of my days at the museum going through the incoming hardware, cleaning it up, making sure it worked and before putting it onto the archival shelves for display, archiving or being sold.

Being Cambridge-based, we had a lot of Acorn gear coming through our doors. So much so there is (still, I think) an entire room dedicated to the Acorn BBC Micro. If you don’t know who Acorn are, they invented the ARM CPU architecture, which is used in basically every single thing you own.

Anyway, a family donated an Acorn Archimedes A3010 and a box of floppy discs. I checked out the hardware, it was in good knick, and after a quick wipe down looked just like the other ones we had. As part of the process, I didn’t normally check out unlabelled discs. Whenever I had, it was normally some random pirated software with the label "Ben's disc" or something (we should go back to sharing pirated software). For whatever reason, I was compelled to give a few discs a look. I didn’t know much about the Archimedes platform, so why not see what wonders could be found amongst the 3.5” plastic trays?

A couple of discs in, I found one which contained text files, all seemingly created by the previous owner. It was sporadic journal entries from the decade the owner had used the machine. CV’s he had created and sent off towards the end of his career working locally in tech. Notes created without a thought of a future interlopers intrusion. It was fascinating. A glimpse into someones life I would never have known about.

Out of curiosity, I looked the guy up on Google. His CV had his full name, his address, and an old URL of his. The first result was an obituary, he had died of cancer.

I have been thinking a lot about legacy the last few months. This blog post has been written, trashed, and written again, several times in the process of those thoughts.

In one version of it, we explored over a meandering 5000 words data exports from some of my accounts on popular services like Google, Twitter, Facebook. I contrasted that with some analysis of the AOL search data leak from 2006, wondering what happened to those people. I found 4 users in the data leak who had searched for “aortic dissection”, and we went through their searches with some Python to extract some meaning and insight. One of them had even searched for answers about the ticking noise of their new heart valve, which I matched with me searching for the same thing from my phone 11 days after my own heart surgery.

While I was inspecting these random American souls from early 2006, it dawned on me that I couldn’t find myself mirrored amongst them anywhere. I didn’t feel a connection to the person on the other side of the data. It was just data compressed into an unrelenting machine meant to produce more money. They might have been searching for same things as I was, but that didn’t mean anything as a person. I was trying to hallucinate a connection with someone who also Googled the colour blue 20 years ago.

For a long time, I have treated my digital data as hallowed, part of a legacy that we all leave behind. I don’t know why, it just felt like I should, and I have been making backups of my data for years onto cloud storage. So much of everything I have done since I was 13 has been recorded, that these bits and bytes should probably meant something. It clearly means something to these corporations or they wouldn't go out their way to collect it all in the first place. It wasn't until I looked at someone else's auto generated, collected data, that I realised my own was meaningless. It wasn't me.

A few weeks after going through the Archimedes, I was back in the museum and I noticed the same box of floppy discs on the floor. I carried about on with my day, doing bits and bobs, volunteer shit, which mainly consisted of organising things and putting them on the online content management system.

Closing time eventually rolled around after a hard day of typing software into a computer. As we were packing up to leave, I walked past the floppy discs again. We had thousands of blank/unmarked floppy discs already, probably more than the museum would ever need to go through in their lifetime. I don’t know why I did it, but I asked if I could take the box home. I had an excuse of just wanting some more floppy discs for my Amiga (the hobbies of an incredibly stable and adjusted 19-year-old). But in reality, I just had this niggling feeling that these discs shouldn’t just be wiped clean or thrown away.

I got home, and I tried to load one up on my computer using an emulator and a USB floppy drive. It didn’t work, and after an evening of trying, I gave up. I’m sure eventually I would get a hold of an A3010 and be able to load them properly again.

When I think about legacy, I think about leaving behind a part of yourself. I have thought about what a person would look at if I had died during my heart issues 18 months ago, and I find it pretty fucking bleak. My Spotify, YouTube history, etc don’t actually show who I am. They aren’t me really, they’re this filtered, algorithmic, non-human version of what a mega-corporation thinks I am. Because I liked one monkey tweet on Twitter they might think I just love gibbons.

3 years ago I started taking film photos. Like most things I do, I don’t quite know why. I guess it just felt like something real, tangible. At around the same time, I also upgraded my DSLR to a nice mirrorless camera and some expensive lenses to take some lovely crisp, digital photos with. A year later I had completely stopped using my digital camera, because it didn't feel like I was putting a part of me into the photos. They felt indistinguishable to the photos I quickly take everyday with my iPhone. I like that I can go back and hold the photos and negatives I took as a kid with my wee £5 disposable camera + development combo you got at Boots. They're real.

To complete this wanky image of myself, I have also got really into vinyl records. Not because they sound better or anything like that, but because I can hold them. They work as a great Pomodoro timer while I’m working (I really recommend that), and the aesthetics of listening to a good record are great. But when I die, they will be left behind, and someone can donate them or give them away, and a part of me, something I enjoyed and held, will move on. I’m going to start leaving little notes in the sleeve of every single vinyl I listen to with my brief thoughts on the record. For no reason other than to have that bit extra of me left behind. When I end up in a charity shop in 2040 and someone picks up Avril Lavigne’s Let Go, I’ll be about for the ride.

Ultimately it is nothing more than a vanity project for myself, deeming my life and personality to be of great enough importance for literally anyone to care. But I think it's pretty normal to want to be remembered. I still have those floppy discs, sat waiting in a box in the attic. I don’t think I will throw them away, despite the fact they are unreadable (without some effort) to me. There will be people who have passed away, whether too young to leave a legacy except with their the closest family, or too busy to know that they didn’t have the time to start leaving themselves behind, who will not be remembered. I don’t think I want to do that to floppy disc man. While I live, he does, and you don't know his name, but he gets to live on a wee bit in you now too.

I will be forgotten too, I am not naive to that. Maybe it’ll take a long time, maybe it won’t. But I know now that I won’t be remembered by the things corporations remember about me, but by the pieces of me I get to leave behind. Hopefully, it won’t be too much effort clearing me out of the house.

Thanks for reading that. I think the post lacks a coherent through line so it's a weird read. But after throwing away so much of this post multiple times to try and find a point that made sense, I felt I should just post it and move on.

This blog is a part of my legacy too I guess. It’s just some words online, but a small part of the reason I post here is so that when I do die I’ve kept a good chunk of words talking about myself. You won’t find out my favourite album, or hold my photos and see any notes or drawings I’ve made. But you’ll know a bit about someone who once was, whom you might remember for a week and then forget about later. That’s alright with me.

Over the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about change. What it means to change as a person, and have change happen to you.

Recently I bought a book about change. Made it through 20 odd pages before I decided it wasn’t for me. I don’t think managing your own personal change from the guise of business “experts” is the right way to do anything. But it has a (potentially made up) stat from some study in it that the average person will go through 36~ change events in their life*. That seems like a lot to me.

For most people my age (I am only 31, thanks I know I look good for my age), the major life changes will be things like moving house, changing jobs, or having children. But when I think about change as a concept, it is often negative. You were doing well at something, then one day it all changed, and you lost your job. Or you lost your house because your shitty landlord decided the rent was too low. Or having children didn’t work out.

I often feel admiration for people who go through change and make it through to the other side. I get to see them thriving and being their best (or at least, the ones who are open about the change). They try and turn that negative change into a positive one. That friend who lost their job 8 months ago, found something new and is excited to begin fresh somewhere better. The change fucking sucks the moment it happens, and for a long time after. But we are privileged where we are in the world to try and move on.

Obviously I can point to something like my heart surgery as a huge change event in my life. It has physically and mentally changed everything about me. I don’t think I am the same person I was 2 years ago in such sweeping ways I can’t describe. When I was in hospital recovering and infected, I remember sobbing and begging the nurses to let me be normal. I didn’t want to change, I felt fine with my life as it was. But the change had already happened, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

A few months ago I asked a few people whether they thought I had changed as a person. I think I was always good and fair, but the consensus was that I had changed. I asked someone “how” and they said “I don’t know, you just have”. Fair, because it’s something I also can’t articulate, and I was trying to get someone else to do it for me. The change feels so total I might as well be a different person. A doppelgänger placed in this body which ticks loudly, living a life that wasn’t built by them.

Before The Event, I would walk home from work every time I was in the office from the job I was in at the time. It’s about 5km, takes about an hour up and down the Sheffield hills (who built a city here man). After heart surgery, that’s a long fucking way. It was a goal because it felt like I should be doing it. Paradoxically I wanted to move on from the change by going back to the way things were before.

When I finally made the walk from the office back home, on the route up the winding roads I would take from years gone, the journey was complete, and I cried. I said to my wife it was nice to feel normal. I imagine people at my work, or those around me when I did things like played Magic on an evening had no idea how much that little bit of normalcy meant to me.

But there is a reality that after change it can’t go back to how it was, not really. Reaching that milestone didn’t fill the hole in me the way I thought it would. Every milestone I have set myself for the last 18 months has felt like that. It's a bottomless void which consumes whatever I try and fill it with. The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.

Given the space of time, I have changed for the better. Not physically, obviously. There is only so much an artificial ascending aorta can be a benefit over a natural squishy blood vessel (the main benefit being that I get to be alive). But mentally I am a lot more dedicated to the things in my life, and the people around me. I wrote previously about having “infinite time”, and a few months on, that’s even more true. There’s so much I want to do, and hopefully enough time to do it.

Since last summer I have been wanting to run. In November I started my plan for that, with daily 4k increasingly fast walks bobbing up and down the hills of Sheffield. 2 weeks ago I finally made it, and I ran 5k. It was slow (43 minutes), but it was complete. It is hard to appreciate how difficult this has been. But I am better for the journey and having completed it. I’ve done it 9 more times in the last 2 weeks, and will hopefully do it more. Maybe it is weird to feel grateful to have come so close to dying, and not. I am grateful. My life will never be the same. That’s okay. Maybe it’s even right.

If we have on average 36 change events in our life, and I can point to like ~10 in my life so far, then I am terrified for the other 26. But I know that it doesn’t have to be bad. Even when it’s the worst thing imaginable.

I will continue to set myself small incremental milestones. When I reach that next milestone, and I come out the other side unfulfilled, I will try again for the next one. Maybe I will just keep doing that until I can’t anymore.

*I don’t know if actually dying counts as a life changing event in the study. It would be a bit annoying shortchanged on one life changing event because dying is counted.

I have liked taking photos since I was a wee’un. Growing up with many disposable cameras in 90’s, digital for the next 20 years and then recently going back to good old analog photos in my 30’s. I love just pressing that shutter button and producing a permanent record of a moment in time.

These photos are not particularly interesting, or “artful”. I don’t think is a word, but you know what I mean. A past me tried to do that, and maybe they produced something interesting. But as I have aged that is the opposite of what I want to do. I am interested in taking pictures of the mundane. Existing, to me, is the most interesting thing something can do.

A few months ago I was waiting for a friend at a train station. I spent the time waiting ignoring my book and phone, and just watched the people go by, vicariously living in this brief moment of their life. The dad trying to wrangle his two young daughters into keeping close to him in the busyness of the stations floor. The guy with who had a leg prosthetic, which you probably wouldn’t notice at first glance by how gracefully he walked with it. The businessperson with a laptop next to them on the almost entirely useless tiny table attached to the seats used by those waiting, but then choosing to completely ignore the laptop in favour of scrolling on their phone. Hundreds of people walked by, every single one interesting.

When I take photos, I want to take pictures of the mundane. The beauty of that is it’s always there, a shadow cast over everything. I want to capture what the world is like for that moment. People trying to do their jobs, or get their daily tasks done. Concrete buildings on an empty street. If I have kids, then I'll want to take pictures of them doing everyday things, and eventually give them a wee camera to take pictures of their own. I'm going to start taking pictures of the people I meet up with.

Watching people go by and basking in everyday is my personal form of meditation. During my morning commute on the tram, sitting in a coffee shop. Or better yet, when I’m on the train absorbing what is going on around me in the carriage. Looking out the window at the world go by, as the people across from me talk about things going on in their lives. That's the best shit. Soul enrichment.

I read a book last year at the recommendation of a friend, which I have probably mentioned in a previously blog post. "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami. I would recommend this book to almost anyone, because it's short (a good weekend read), and really fucking boring. But that's the point, and what made it one of my favourite books I have read. The journal/memoir of a Japanese runner preparing for marathons amongst his daily work over a period of a couple of years is surprisingly inspiring. People will probably re-use the quote "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional" from the book. But I think the best quote comes right at the end when he's talking about what he'd want written on his gravestone. "At Least He Never Walked".

I think I would want mine to say "He Always Paid Attention".

CW: Physical abuse

One of the things people pause to ask me when I tell my story about the aortic dissection is “Wait they just let you go after the A&E visit?”.

When I had what we now know was my initial aortic dissection, I was 29 years old. I went blind, delusional, and vomited all over the inside of an ambulance (and on my wife, thanks). I came back around 24 hours in the acute ward at hospital.

Not long after my sight came back and I started making more coherent sense, two doctors came into my bay and kicked my wife out. The first question they asked was “What drugs did you take?”, and when I naively and honestly replied “Ibuprofen”, they just went “Yeah really sure man”. They didn’t believe me, and somehow after losing 2 urine samples which would have proven that what I said was true, they let me go.

I remember it so clearly. Their faces as they spoke, the bed with bread crumbs in from where I was trying to eat blind and delusional, the curtained bay that cocooned where I had been all night while my wife sat next to me worried. I wasn’t angry at the time, or later once I found out I needed to have the surgery. Everyone else around me was angry on my behalf, but it seemed silly to complain or bring it up. Sure I /could/ have died, but I was one of the lucky few who didn’t. I guess they were lucky as well.

When I went back to A&E 2 weeks later with a heart rate peaking between 150 and 220, I sat in the waiting room for hours to be told I had anxiety by the cardiologist who was working that evening. Despite asking questions and feeling unwell, I accepted it, I wasn’t angry. Maybe it would just go away, and I would rather be at home. A&E is not a fun place after 9pm.

For 4 months I repeatedly went to the doctors to complain about chest pains, and just general weird things going on with my heart. I was told it was stomach acid by multiple doctors. I regularly see one of the doctors who did this. He asks me how I’m doing as if he’s a friend. And I understand that the metrics and insights we have from millions of other patients say that I am very much not the person this would happen to. A belief in what I’m saying from people would have gone a long way. But I’m still not angry about it. How could I be, I survived.

When I was 10, my mother hit me in the face while my family sat at the dinner table. She threatened to run away for the dozenth time. While my nose bled and I sat crying, she performed her scene for the family. A short time after, while I watched my parents shout on the drive from my brother's window, I called 999. I got put through to a woman asking me what was wrong. Through my sobbing and laboured intake, I told her my mother was threatening to leave. She listened for a moment, and then said “Just go and speak to her, I am sure it will all be fine.”. That does make me angry, because 20 years later I feel I only just survived it.

Today is my 31st birthday. Every year I think back to that moment. I don’t really know why my brain has made this association, the only relation it has is it happened in the darkness of winter. It makes me do want to do nothing for my birthday, I would rather just be silent.

I could blame it on any number of things. But it’s my inability to let go that keeps me here. When I live in the memories of my heart surgery, there are moments that till bring me close to tears. It has gotten a lot better, everything has, and I am rapidly learning to let go. I have a privileged life I get to live in with a wonderful partner. But I live with the first hand experience that if people had trusted and believed others more, so much of everything could just be avoided. That lack of trust in people makes me angry.

There are advantages to heart surgery, one of which is having an “aortaversary” in the other half of the year in the sun. I think that will be my new birthday instead.

I can say now, now the year has passed, that 2024 was better than 2023. But it still strongly ranks in the top 3 worst years of my life.

This post is a personal check-in for the start of 2025. A single blog post to put a retrospective of 2024 in about my heart, hobbies and life, and also aggregate a bunch of my health data into one place. They probably shouldn't be the same blog post.

Overview of the year

January 1st 2024, I was 4 months on from major heart surgery, and brother, I felt like shit. They tell you that it takes 6 months for it to start feeling a bit more normal. It took about 8 for me. But it did eventually change, in what was probably a long gradual change but felt like a single moment. There are a bunch of really small physical things they don’t explain to you that you’re going to feel. As an example, for the first 8 months when I would lay on my back in bed it felt like my heart was physically sinking into my chest. It was weird. I am glad that my body felt like it accepted its fate, and it and I decided to collectively start moving on.

Just before that physiological acceptance happened, I think I had a minor mental breakdown. March and April were long. Pretty much every single one of my daily walks I would cry, and I would cry randomly as I remembered what had happened to me. I started sessions with the local Sheffield mental health service, and while the actual sessions themselves didn’t help that much, the reading resources they gave me did. Specifically around living with heart problems and uncertainty. It was validating that they feelings were so common that they made a whole booklet about it. Plus it was a change of pace, I couldn’t take another rehab sessions with a group of geriatric men.

This was also peak I hate work zone. While the physical side felt like it was becoming normal, my memory is something that is still not quite right. Or rather, it’s not the same as it was before. And being on top of remembering stuff at work makes it so much easier. I am still struggling to remember things still. Peoples names are sometimes an absolute mystery to me. I forgot the name of one of my colleagues for about an hour recently, whom I've worked with for almost 2 years. It sucks. Now, a lot of what I do at work goes through a notebook and pen. Writing stuff down makes remembering a lot more manageable.

In June I had a surgery to remove the sternal wires that were holding my ribs together. Not to be gross about it, but I spent the first 7 months of 2024 bleeding constantly from my chest. I pulled off this persistent ooze marvellously in my opinion, I don’t think many people noticed. But, even the recovery for this fairly basic wire removal surgery wasn’t straight forward. I would say you can’t win them all, but I’ve been taking losses for almost 2 years now. If you ever want gross details and to see some photos of a surgical wound opening up a couple of weeks after a surgery just let me know.

For September I was off work the entire month, due to a large amount of accumulated annual leave. I didn't realise it when I booked it off, but that time out of work was necessary. After the main surgery last year, I went back to work fairly quickly. By December 2023 I was back to working 5 days a week full time. I felt like I needed the routine. I wrote a blog post about that closer to the time. But I realised after some time that I hadn't given myself the time to just have air, and space. It turns out I needed space to just wallow and grieve, which helped more than anything else that happened over 2024. I also wrote about grief.

For November, I went a bit crazy and did, perhaps, a bit too much. I went out more than I had all year combined, and had a great time. I saw new and old friends, went to events, drank (still not smoking, yet), and did some more planning for the future. I paid for that by dying of a cough for most of December. But it was worth it. It was this month that I decided that if I have been given time on this planet to continue living, then I should spend it doing things for and with people. I started using the nonsense phrase “Infinite Time”. I think that’s probably my favourite blog post of the year. It’s honest.

Work

I work as a web developer, focusing mainly on the frontend. I’ve been doing web development as my (mostly) sole focus since I got my first part-time dev job in 2014.

This was a weird year. I have spent a lot of it questioning what I do. Not just in terms of the industry and my career, but as a person. What does it mean to sell my labour for capital? Can I continue to be happy doing that, knowing that time is potentially limited? If not, what would make me happier? Just normal stuff.

I don’t have any answers for any of those questions. I think companies which use the labour of others for the profit of a few are immoral, but I also take part in that same practice at work. Especially now as I move into 2025 having been promoted to my teams Engineering Manager.

The position for this opened up in late August, and after thinking about it for 30 seconds I realised I didn’t want to do it. I enjoy being good at coding and my job, and I didn’t especially want to be anyones manager. So I wouldn’t be. My September break rolled around, and I still agreed with my decision in October.

My team was still without an engineering manager in November (the company was correctly taking its time and looking externally), and I wanted to try something different with a new epic at work. We haven’t changed how we do development since I joined the team 2 years ago. So I put it forward to the team, and the team agreed to try it.

It worked out, and I wanted to start trying putting work into peoples hands which would make them happy, give them ownership over something when we’ve been lacking it. I realised I could probably be a good manager for my team.

I move deeper into the labour aristocracy with this job change. And my day to day will have less coding in it. We can’t control companies and capitalism. But, hopefully, I can make the people who make up my team at work happier and more fulfilled with the 35 hours or so a week they spend giving their labour to someone else.

Books

From 2020 to 2023 I don’t think I completed a single book. Not sure why. Never was a big reader growing up.

In amongst appointment waiting rooms and stays in hospital, I started reading. I finished the first book of The Expanse in December/January. Now, I’ve read 5 of them, 3 Susan Sontag Books, and 5 other books. Considering I went from zero books for 4 years, 13 books in a year is a triumph.

In 2025 I want to read more. I think this should be a habit for me. It has really enriched me this year. I’m only like halfway through The Expanse so I will finish that. But I want to read some classics. A friend recommended Moby Dick so I’ll give that a go. And I picked up some James Joyce books including Ulysses, along with the the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey so I can read it and become a weirdo chud on Twitter.

Hobbies

I swear in the UK, we make all kids play a random musical instrument for at least a couple of years (recorder orchestra in year 5 massive). For me growing up, that was piano, and for a little while, flute. I stopped playing piano around aged 16, because playing for exams was destroying my soul. I didn’t really touch a set of keys again until a couple of years ago, when I got a nice digital piano. It wasn’t being used anywhere near enough to warrant the purchase, but I kept it around. The second half of this year with a month off work, with space to breathe mentally and not have work and life hanging over me, I started to play it more. I really enjoy it again.

That was also true for drawing and painting. And basically everything else. When you don't work and just have free mental time, you get to just do things you want to.

With a job, and life, we don’t make time for hobbies because they feel frivolous to the idea of staying alive. Someone recently said that I have too much free time. I think that is partially true. But mentally I have also worked hard to ensure that I can use this free time for things I enjoy. I still rot on the sofa, and play shitty video games frequently. But an hour or two every couple of days for something else. Yeah I can do that. And it's been one of the best things of the year.

Health

Feel free to skip this section to the end if you don't want to read some GCSE grade graph analysis.

If there's one daily device I have benefitted most from, it's my Apple Watch. It remains on my wrist almost 24/7, only leaving to be charged. It provides me some weird comfort to know that it is always recording my heart beat. A couple of times during my diagnosis and post op issues, the data has been vital for pleading my case of "I am not okay, please look at me". If you have heart problems or have concerns, consider getting one!

Wearing it all the time makes a lot of data over a year! Most of this section is presenting the data included in my Apple Health export, which was then parsed poorly with a quick Python script, turning the data into a Plotly graph. I'm sure there is a good reason to not put this data online, but fuck it.

General

Before we get into the Apple Health stuff, let’s just talk about my general health.

My health has been better! Besides the constant ticking of my heart, my heart valve and piping changes mean I get out of breath easily walking up hills, but I'm not getting exhausted physically. It’s a weird sensation, and I wish I could do more strenuous exercises like running. Getting properly healthy with this major health concern hanging over your head is a journey which I will be on for the rest of my life.

A bit concern post op was the atrial fibrillation. For about 3-4 months post surgery, every day my heart would have moments where it would freak out for minutes at a time. It didn't feel great. To try and help, the hospital put my on beta-blockers, which aim to reduce and control your heart rate. This sucked even more! My heart rate would suddenly plummet to 35-40bpm, which feels like you're dying. I am happy to report that for almost all of 2024, that has not been a problem, and I am so glad about that.

For my weight, when I got home after my first two surgeries, I had lost 10-12kg over the 2 weeks since being admitted. Where I am today, I have put that 12kg back on, and I think that's great. Losing weight can be a great thing to work for, but it freaked me out that I lost that much weight so quickly. I didn’t feel right, so I’m glad I got some chub back on.

Otherwise all things considered, I have been pretty healthy.

Heart

Starting with the most obvious metric Apple give you: your heart rate. Here's a graph of my monthly min, max and average heart rates.

There's two things I think worth talking about here. Lets start with that max heart rate in September of 190 bpm.

As part of your recovery, you're told that you need to maintain an active and healthy life style. One thing they mention is playing a sport like tennis. So, I tried badminton.

Two things happened. I tripped over my own foot after 5 minutes and twisted my ankle. I thought that was hilarious. And then, in my out of practice shape, I looked at my Apple Watch 10 minutes later midway through a game and noticed my heart rate was 190. I wasn't out of breath and didn't feel like I was exhausting myself, but I was sweating a lot. At that moment I learnt the difference between the heart rehab sessions exercises and real exercise on your heart.

Second I want to talk about the trending up of my average heart rate. I don't really know why. In the second half of the year I did ramp up a lot of things I was doing. Walking quicker, doing more etc. But I can't explain the whole average being moved up like that.

Lets see if the resting heart rate also trends up. For this, Apple Health segments out the heart rate data which occurs during a recorded exercise, so we can see how it looks when I'm not tripping over myself and making a fool of myself at badminton. Here's a graph which plots the 2022, 2023 and 2024 resting heart rate:

Interesting! If we look at just the 2024 trend, it is almost a flat line, which is good and that average heart raising was probably for other reasons! But there's something unavoidably obvious here, and that is my resting heart rate in 2024 is ~10bpm higher than 2022. I was a lot healthier in 2022, consistently exercising with weights, regularly using an exercise bike etc. The goal for 2025 could be to start trying to trend that back down a little bit. But it is well within the healthy range for my age.

I have also included the 2023 data, just to show how an aortic dissection changed my resting heart rate over the year. I find it really interesting!

Recently I have learnt a potential reason about why my heart rate is harder to control, which I'll explore more in future. It will be the greatest challenge for exercise going into 2025 and beyond.

Walking

This is my main form of exercise. In 2024 I walked an average of 6.2km a day, totalling around ~2250km. The Apple Watch is never going to be perfect at calculating this, but I'll take that big number

The amount of walking I'm doing has trended down over the year. Until my surgery at the start of June, I was taking the amount I was walking pretty seriously. I needed to do at least 5km a day or else, and I don't think I missed a days walking until that surgeries recovery. After that, I took it a bit easier. I still walk every day at least 4km, but I can have a day off every now and then.

Walking speed is one I didn't expect to see trend down. I think in reality this data is telling a bit of a lie. I think my walking speed has been pretty consistent over the year in reality, but the Apple Watch can't tell the difference between a brisk uphill walk on the lovely Sheffield hills, to a leisurely walk with the dog, or a day off where I just walk around the house. Because I was taking no days off at the start of the year, my walking speed is just higher.

In my goal to start running though, I think my walking speed will be a key metric. I should build up for my usual 12 minute km's, increasing it slowly and seeing how quick I can get before my heart rate gets too high (around 160bpm).

Stairs

I put this one here as a bit of a joke. Stairs at the start of my recovery were my arch nemesis. My home office is up 2 flights of steep terraced house stairs, and when I go to the office there are 3 flights between the ground and the front door. And they would absolutely kill me.

I thought my stair ascent speed would have increased a lot. But apparently not! Maybe I'm just not viewing it as much of a challenge anymore, and just taking the stairs like a normal person would without pushing myself. No one wants to see you crawling into the office at 9am completely out of breath from 3 flights of stairs.

God knows what I was doing in week 16 to end up climbing so many flights of stairs.

Sleep

I love sleep. It's sick. Alongside wearing it all day, I often wear the Apple Watch to bed as well. It's pointless gamifying of something I need to do, but I just like seeing the numbers at the end.

The calculations for my sleep hours per day are a bit effed. I had to write a quick bit of code to try and estimate it based on a series of events the Apple Health data export had in it. It resulted in these two graphs:

These are meaningless, because I know I don't sleep this much. Apple Health knows it too with their smart algorithms, and it generally rates it an hour or two lower per day. But I did the best I could with what I was given here.

V02 Max

This is such a Mickey Mouse metric from Apple Health. To work out your real V02 max, you need a whole setup with a mask to record oxygen consumption and a treadmill. And you’re telling me my Apple Watch can do it? Nah mate.

If we ignore all that though, lets look at what the graph has given us. I've extended this graph to the start of 2023, so we can see a fuller picture of how my aortic dissection and surgeries have affected it.

Right around April 2023 when I first had my dissection, we can see it takes a bit of a dive. From 42 to 36 by the time I was about to have my surgery. Post surgery, it continues down to 34 by Christmas (we'll ignore the bump to 38, who knows).

Suddenly Apple Health is calculating it seemingly every single day in 2024, and we build ourselves back up to 38 again, before the June surgery knocks it back to 35. Now, we're holding pretty steady at ~37-38.

I don't know what these mean, I'm sure Apple is doing something mega clever here. But it has made a fun graph for us to look at.

End of the year

Every year ends the same way. I love the build up to the Christmas. I like that pretty much everyone you see out and about is on the same page, and we’re all looking forward to some time off work. Then Christmas actually comes, and it’s the hollowest I feel all year. Childhood trauma persists through adulthood trauma. But I do get to spend 3-4 hours cooking Christmas dinner, which I love doing. I should cook more.

This blog has been cathartic for me. I don’t expect anyone to read it, and I don’t think anyone does. But it has been healthy for me to put things out into the world. Who knows what 2025 will be like. Hopefully, I keep doing myself the small kindness of writing this shit.