Blog – Dan Q

FlipFlop Solitaire’s Deck-Generation Secret

For the last few years, my go-to mobile game¹ has been FlipFlop Solitaire.

The game

The premise is simple enough:

5-column solitaire game with 1-5 suits.
23 cards dealt out into those columns; only the topmost ones face-up.
2 “reserve” cards retained at the bottom.
Stacks can be formed atop any suit based on value-adjacency (in either order, even mixing the ordering within a stack)
Individual cards can always be moved, but stacks can only be moved if they share a value-adjacency chain and are all the same suit.
Aim is to get each suit stacked in order at the top.

One of the things that stands out to me is that the game comes with over five thousand pre-shuffled decks to play, all of which guarantee that they are “winnable”.

Playing through these is very satisfying because it means that if you get stuck, you know that it’s because of a choice that you made², and not (just) because you get unlucky with the deal.

Every deck is “winnable”?

When I first heard that every one of FlipFlop‘s pregenerated decks were winnable, I misinterpreted it as claiming that every conceivable shuffle for a game of FlipFlop was winnable. But that’s clearly not the case, and it doesn’t take significant effort to come up with a deal that’s clearly not-winnable. It only takes a single example to disprove a statement!

Paper-based sketch showing an 'unwinnable' deck of 'five suit' FlopFlop, formed by stacking the cards in a strict reverse order to make it as hard as possible. — If you think you’ve found a solution to this deal – for example, by (necessarily) dealing out all of the cards, then putting both reserve kings out and stacking everything else on top of them in order to dig down to the useful cards, bear in mind that (a) the maximum stack depth of 20 means you can get to a 6, or a 5, but not both, and (b) you can’t then move any of those stacks in aggregate because – although it’s not clear in my monochrome sketch – the suits cycle in a pattern to disrupt such efforts.

That it’s possible for a fairly-shuffled deck of cards to lead to an “unwinnable” game of FlipFlop Solitaire means the author must have necessarily had some mechanism to differentiate between “winnable” (which are probably the majority) and “unwinnable” ones. And therein lies an interesting problem.

If the only way to conclusively prove that a particular deal is “winnable” is to win it, then the developer must have had an algorithm that they were using to test that a given deal was “winnable”: that is – a brute-force solver.

So I had a go at making one³. The code is pretty hacky (don’t judge me) and, well… it takes a long, long time.

Partially that’s because the underlying state engine I used, BfsBruteForce, is a breadth-first optimising algorithm. It aims to find the absolute fewest-moves solution, which isn’t necessarily the fastest one to find because it means that it has to try all of the “probably stupid” moves it finds⁴ with the same priority as the the “probably smart” moves⁵.

I played about with enhancing it with some heuristics, and scoring different play states, and then running that in a pruned depth-first way, but it didn’t really help much. It came to an answer eventually, sure… but it took a long, long time, and it’s pretty easy to see why: the number of permutations for a shuffled deck of cards is greater than the number of atoms on Earth!

If you pull off a genuinely random shuffle, then – statistically-speaking – you’ve probably managed to put that deck into an order that no deck of cards has never been in before!⁶

And sure: the rules of the game reduce the number of possibilities quite considerably… but there’s still a lot of them.

So how are “guaranteed winnable” decks generated?

I think I’ve worked out the answer to this question: it came to me in a dream!

Show this puzzle to any smarter-than-average child and they’ll quickly realise that the fastest way to get the solution is not to start from each programmer and trace their path… but to start from the laptop and work backwards!

The trick to generating “guaranteed winnable” decks for FlipFlop Solitaire (and, probably, any similar game) is to work backwards.

Instead of starting with a random deck and checking if it’s solvable by performing every permutation of valid moves… start with a “solved” deck (with all the cards stacked up neatly) and perform a randomly-selected series of valid reverse-moves! E.g.:

The first move is obvious: take one of the kings off the “finished” piles and put it into a column.
For the next move, you’ll either take a different king and do the same thing, or take the queen that was exposed from under the first king and place it either in an empty column or atop the first king (optionally, but probably not, flipping the king face down).
With each subsequent move, you determine what the valid next-reverse-moves are, choose one at random (possibly with some kind of weighting), and move on!

In computational complexity theory, you just transformed an NP-Hard problem⁷ into a P problem.

Once you eliminate repeat states and weight the randomiser to gently favour moving “towards” a solution that leaves the cards set-up and ready to begin the game, you’ve created a problem that may take an indeterminate amount of time… but it’ll be finite and its complexity will scale linearly. And that’s a big improvement.

I started implementing a puzzle-creator that works in this manner, but the task wasn’t as interesting as the near-impossible brute-force solver so I gave up, got distracted, and wrote some even more-pointless code instead.

If you go ahead and make an open source FlipFlop deck generator, let me know: I’d be interested to play with it!

Footnotes

¹ I don’t get much time to play videogames, nowadays, but I sometimes find that I’ve got time for a round or two of a simple “droppable” puzzle game while I’m waiting for a child to come out of school or similar. FlipFlop Solitaire is one of only three games I have installed on my phone for this purpose, the other two – both much less frequently-played – being Battle of Polytopia and the buggy-but-enjoyable digital version of Twilight Struggle.

² Okay, it feels slightly frustrating when you make a series of choices that are perfectly logical and the most-rational decision under the circumstances. But the game has an “undo” button, so it’s not that bad.

³ Mostly I was interested in whether such a thing was possible, but folks who’re familiar with how much I enjoy “cheating” at puzzles (don’t get me started on Jigidi jigsaws…) by writing software to do them for me will also realise that this is Just What I Am Like.

⁴ An example of a “probably stupid” move would be splitting a same-suit stack in order to sit it atop a card of a different suit, when this doesn’t immediately expose any new moves. Sometimes – just sometimes – this is an optimal strategy, but normally it’s a pretty bad idea.

⁵ Moving a card that can go into the completed stacks at the top is usually a good idea… although just sometimes, and especially in complex mid-game multi-suit scenarios, it can be beneficial to keep a card in play so that you can use it as an anchor for something else, thereby unblocking more flexible play down the line.

⁶ Fun fact: shuffling a deck of cards is a sufficient source of entropy that you can use it to generate cryptographic keystreams, as Bruce Schneier demonstrated in 1999.

⁷ I’ve not thought deeply about it, but determining if a given deck of cards will result in a winnable game probably lies somewhere between the travelling salesman and the halting problem, in terms of complexity, right? And probably not something a right-thinking person would ask their desktop computer to do for fun!

Flossed

Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.

Chicory House, Real Coffee, Flooded Keyboard

As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱

Chicory, Coffee, and Code

Now that we’ve finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment… with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!

My Salary History

Jeremy Keith posted his salary history last week. I absolutely agree with him that employers exploit the information gap created by opaque salary advertisement, and I think that our industry of software engineering is especially troublesome for this.

So I’m joining him (and others) in choosing to share my salary history. I’ve set up a new page for that purpose, but here’s the summary of its initial state:

Understand

A few understandings and caveats:

For most of my career I’ve described myself as a “Full-Stack Web Applications Developer”, but I’ve worked outside of every one of those words and my job titles have often been more like “CMS Developer” or “Senior Engineer (Security)”.
My specialisms and “hot areas” are security engineering, web standards, performance, and accessibility.
When I worked multiple roles in a year, I’ve tried to capture that, but there’ll be some fuzziness around the edges.
The salaries are rounded slightly to make nice readable numbers.
I’ve not always worked full-time; all salaries are translated into “full-time equivalent”¹.
I’ve only included jobs that fit into my software engineering career².
If the table below looks out-of-date then I’ve probably just forgotten to update it. Let me know!

History

Year	Employer	Salary	Notes
2025 – 2026	Firstup	£80,000	Remote. + Stock (spread over four years).
2024 – 2025	Automattic	£111,000	Remote. + Stock (one-off bonus, worth ~£6,000).
2023	Automattic	£103,000	Remote.
2021 – 2022	Automattic	£98,000	Remote
2019 – 2020	Automattic	£89,000	Remote.
2015 – 2019	Bodleian Libraries + Freelance	£39,000	Hybrid.
2011 – 2014	Bodleian Libraries	£36,000	Practices salary transparency! ❤️
2010 – 2011	SmartData + Freelance	£26,000	Remote.
2007 – 2009	SmartData	£24,000
2004 – 2006	SmartData	£19,500
2002 – 2003	SmartData	£16,500	Alongside full-time study.
2002	CTA	£18,000
2001	Freelance	£4,500	Ad-hoc and hard to estimate. Alongside full-time study.

What does that look like?

I drew a graph, but I don’t like it. Mostly because I don’t see my salary as a “goal” to aim for or some kind of “score”.

It’s gone up; it’s gone down; but I’ve always been more-motivated by what I’m working on, with whom, and for what purpose than I have been on how much I get paid for it³. But if you want to see:

I’m not sure to what degree my career looks typical or not. But I guess I also don’t care! My motivations are probably different than most (a little-more idealistic, a little-less capitalistic), I’d guess.

Footnotes

¹ i.e. what I’d have earned if I had worked full-time

² That summer back in college that I worked in a factory building striplight fittings doesn’t appear, for example!

³ Pro-tip if you’re looking at my CV and pitching me an opportunity: mention what you expect to pay, sure, but if you’re trying to win me over then tell me about the problems I’ll be solving and how that’ll make the world a better place. That’s how you motivate me to accept your offer!

Good morning, Goldfinch

A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!

Chicory Keys

Towards the end of last week we picked up the keys to the Chicory House.¹ We’ve now officially moved in to the place we’ll be calling home for the next six months or so, while we wait for our Actual House to be repaired following our catastrophic flood in February.²

As part of my efforts to travel light, I use a pretty small wallet – a lump of carbon fibre about the size of a deck of cards³ that contains my ID, bank cards, and – in pocket at the back – my essential keys. Typically that’s my front door key and my bike lock key.

Minimalist carbon fibre wallet, balanced on two fingertips, with parts of a Halifax Mastercard credit card showing from behind an elasticated band. — The keys tuck in around the back, but there’s a “hook” on the end to which additional keys can be ringed. Sometimes I hook up a second-factor hardware token to it when I’m travelling with one.

And so when I received my front door key to the Chicory House, I had to decide: where does this key belong?

The obvious answer would have been to remove the front door key for my actual home from its special place within my wallet and replace it with the Chicory House’s front door key. That’s the one I’ll need most-often for the foreseeable future, right? My regular front door key can move to the supplementary hook, on a ring, and/or be removed entirely and taken with me only when I need to visit my uninhabitable home.

But that’s not what I did.

Reverse side of my wallet showing my regular house key folded-out from its special spot, and the Chicory House key attached to the hook. — I didn’t even think about what I was doing until I noticed, afterwards, that I’d chosen to put the Chicory House key on the “supplementary keys” hook rather than in the “primary keys” spot.

This made sense as an instinctive move: it’s where I’d clip on the key to any of the half-dozen or so AirBnBs I’ve lived in for the last couple of months, after all! But for a house I’m going to live in for half a year or more it doesn’t seem so rational.

But I haven’t put it back. I think I’m keeping it this way. My regular key gets to keep its special spot because it represents the lost status quo and the aspiration to return. Sure, it’s less-practical for me to keep it there, but its position is symbolic, not sensible.

Swapping the two over would feel like giving in: like caving to the inevitability of us being out of our home for an extended period. Keeping the key where it is means that every time I put my hand in my pocket I’m reminded that the current arrangement is temporary; things will go back to normal. And that’s nice.⁴

Footnotes

¹ The house isn’t actually called that, of course. That’s our nickname for it, on account of it being a substitute for the real thing.

² The flood was exactly two months ago today, which makes today “F-Day plus 60”. We’ve spent most of the intervening time hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB.

³ As somebody who often carries a deck of cards, this is a pretty-convenient size to me!

⁴ That said, the Chicory House is way better than most of the AirBnB’s we’ve been living in, and I’m especially loving being able to sleep on my own familiar mattress again! While I wouldn’t want to live here forever like I’d be happy to in the place we’ve called home since 2020, it’ll certainly suffice for the immediate future. A stepping-stone back towards the lives we’d built before.

Unpacked Kitchen

Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!

A moderately tidy kitchen with faux-marble countertops, under free on which an open large cardboard box can be seen. In the distance, a conservatory contains a small dining table cluttered with computer equipment. — The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!

Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬

Reply to: Sent to Coventry: Who is Princess Victor Duleep Singh?

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Sundeep Braich said:

…

Second: the language “committed suicide” is no longer appropriate. Princess Irene died by suicide. “Committed” is the language of crime. For example, one does not commit a heart attack.

…

You clearly feel strongly enough about this point to have committed it to writing.

(It’s obviously a cause that you’re committed to.)

I’m being sarcastic, of course, but there’s a point. While (like most mental health services) I’m not a fan of describing the act of suicide as “committing” suicide today, for exactly the reasons you describe, it might be appropriate for a historical case.

That’s all I meant to say in a comment… but then I ended up going down a rabbithole.

Let’s sidestep into an example: I said “John William Gott committed blasphemy in 1921” that would be fair. His actions would not be considered criminal today: he was initially arrested for selling pamphlets containing information on birth control but prosecutors tacked on a blasphemy charge because they figured they could get it to stick too, based on the ways his literature was presented. But legally-speaking, Gott committed a crime; a crime that doesn’t exist today.

It’s not a coincidence I’ve lumped jumped from suicide to blasphemy: both were formerly criminalised in Britain and her empire (among many other places) as a direct result of Christian religious tradition: you can probably blame Thomas Aquinas!

Language about the criminality of past offences gets very complicated, very quickly. Some contemporary values seem to be considered so fundamental that it feels wrong to describe historical convictions as criminal. In some of these cases, we see pardons issued or other admissions of fault by the state. Take for example in recent years the payment of compensation to former military personnel who were dishonourably discharged on account of their sexuality. But I’m not aware of anything like that happening related to past convictions of suicide (or, indeed, blasphemy).

With that grounding: let’s take a deeper dive into Irene Duleep Singh, to decide whether or not her suicide would have been considered criminal at the time (it was certainly considered shameful and taboo, even within societies that would not have considered it illegal, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now). Irene died by suicide in the Principality f Monaco in 1926. At that time, Monaco was a protectorate of France with less independence than it is today, and for the most part its legal system seems to have paralleled that in France. I can’t find a specific provision for suicide in Monaco, so it would probably not have been illegal (suicide was illegal under the Ancien Régime but was effectively decriminalised by its omission from the Napoleonic Penal Codes). So: no crime.

Buuuut… Irene could also be considered a citizen of Britain, or of India, or of British India. Suicide was illegal in the UK prior to 1961 and in India until 2024 (wait, what? yeah, really… well… kinda; it’s complicated, especially after 2018). So in her capacity as a citizen or subject of the British Empire, her suicide was criminal.

Both John William Gott and Irene Duleep Singh may well both have committed crimes that would not be considered crimes today. In both cases, their crimes were things that, in my opinion, should never have been criminalised in the first place. But that doesn’t make the historical fact any less-true.

And that’s why I picked up on this one line for my comment.

I absolutely agree that it’s inappropriate and unhelpful to talk about somebody have “committed suicide” today. The language creates a barrier to help and support, which is what should be offered to people experiencing suicidal thoughts! But I don’t see the harm in using it when discussing a historical case from a century ago, at a time at which suicide was seen very differently.

So long as it’s appropriately contextualised for the audience, it seems to me to be harmless. By which I mean to say: not worthy of being called-out by your one-liner… and even-less worthy of my having gone down this long and complicated rabbithole which, somehow, has involved translating old French legislation, digging through the history of Monaco, and learning about the courts of the British Raj.

I guess what I mean to say is that if your intention was to nerdsnipe me with this line… then well played, Sundeep, well played.

100 Days to Offload × 7

I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk‘s “100 Days To Offload” blogging challenge. And today… I just completed it for the seventh time!

Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me – he counts “posts over a twelve month period”, while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: “posts in a calendar year”, because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.

Year	Posts	Success?	Notes
2020	221 (64 for pedants)	✅ Yes^*	Barely made it this year (ignoring reposts, of which I did lots), with my 21 December article about a little-known (and under-supported) way to inject CSS using HTTP headers, which I later used to make a web page for which View Souce showed nothing.
2021	190 (57 for pedants)	✅ Yes^*	A cycle to a nearby geocache was the checkin that made the 100th post of this year, on 27 August.
2022	168 (55 for pedants)	✅ Yes^*	My efforts to check up on one of my own geocaches on 7 September scored the qualifying spot.
2023	165 (86 for pedants)	✅ Yes^*	My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport.
2024	436	🏆 Yes	Writing at full-tilt, my hundredth post came when I found a geocache near Regents Canal, but pedants who disregard reposts and checkins might instead count my excitement at the Ladybird Web browser as the record-breaker. This year also saw me write my 5,000th post on this blog! Wowza!
2025	458	🏆 Yes
2026	197	🏆 Yes

^* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.

After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.

Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day… but it’s 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?

Therefore, by my own restrictions… the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?

Which is today.

Which I just did. 🎉

I started the year knowing that I’d be trying to do this “speedrun”. What I didn’t realise was how hard it would be.

The disruption of getting flooded out of our home in February and the many weeks since of short-term accommodation (of varying quality) has made just living a vaguely normal life very difficult this year (although I’ll admit that it’s also given a topic to write about time and again!).

Anyway: that feels like a win. My fastest ever – the fastest possible, under my ruleset – #100DaysToOffload achievement unlocked.

I wonder what I’ll do next.

(Max props once again to Kev for inventing the challenge.)

The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

Unlike Alice, who spent the year reading papers with a pencil in hand, scribbling notes in the margins, getting confused, re-reading, looking things up, and slowly assembling a working understanding of her corner of the field, Bob has been using an AI agent. When his supervisor sent him a paper to read, Bob asked the agent to summarize it. When he needed to understand a new statistical method, he asked the agent to explain it. When his Python code broke, the agent debugged it. When the agent’s fix introduced a new bug, it debugged that too. When it came time to write the paper, the agent wrote it. Bob’s weekly updates to his supervisor were indistinguishable from Alice’s. The questions were similar. The progress was similar. The trajectory, from the outside, was identical.

Here’s where it gets interesting. If you are an administrator, a funding body, a hiring committee, or a metrics-obsessed department head, Alice and Bob had the same year. One paper each. One set of minor revisions each. One solid contribution to the literature each. By every quantitative measure that the modern academy uses to assess the worth of a scientist, they are interchangeable. We have built an entire evaluation system around counting things that can be counted, and it turns out that what actually matters is the one thing that can’t be.

…

The strange thing is that we already know this. We have always known this. Every physics textbook ever written comes with exercises at the end of each chapter, and every physics professor who has ever stood in front of a lecture hall has said the same thing: you cannot learn physics by watching someone else do it. You have to pick up the pencil. You have to attempt the problem. You have to get it wrong, sit with the wrongness, and figure out where your reasoning broke. Reading the solution manual and nodding along feels like understanding. It is not understanding. Every student who has tried to coast through a problem set by reading the solutions and then bombed the exam knows this in their bones. We have centuries of accumulated pedagogical wisdom telling us that the attempt, including the failed attempt, is where the learning lives. And yet, somehow, when it comes to AI agents, we’ve collectively decided that maybe this time it’s different. That maybe nodding at Claude’s output is a substitute for doing the calculation yourself. It isn’t. We knew that before LLMs existed. We seem to have forgotten it the moment they became convenient.

Centuries of pedagogy, defeated by a chat window.

…

Minas Karamanis, in The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.

This piece by Minas Karamanis is excellent throughout, and if you’ve got the time to read it then you should. He’s a physics postdoc, and this post comes from his experience in his own field, but I feel that the concerns he raises are more-widely valid, too.

In my field – of software engineering – I have similar concerns.

Let’s accept for a moment that an LLM significantly improves the useful output of a senior software engineer (which is very-definitely disputed, especially for the “10x” level of claims we often hear, but let’s just take it as-read for now). I’ve experimented with LLM-supported development for years, in various capacities, and it certainly sometimes feels like they do (although it sometimes also feels like they have the opposite effect!). But if it’s true, then yes: an experienced senior software engineer could conceivably increase their work performance by shepherding a flock of agents through a variety of development tasks, “supervising” them and checking their work, getting them back on-course when they make mistakes, approving or rejecting their output, and stepping in to manually fix things where the machines fail.

In this role, the engineer acts more like an engineering team lead, bringing their broad domain experience to maximise the output of those they manage. Except who they manage is… AI.

Again, let’s just accept all of the above for the sake of argument. If that’s all true… how do we make new senior developers?

Junior developers can use LLMs too. And those LLMs will make mistakes that the junior developer won’t catch, because the kinds of mistakes LLMs make are often hard to spot and require significant experience to identify. But if they’re encouraged to use LLMs rather than making mistakes by hand and learning from them – to keep up, for example, or to meet corporate policies – then these juniors will never gain the essential experience they’ll one day need. They’ll be disenfranchised of the opportunity to grow and learn.

It’s yet to be proven that more-sophisticated models will “solve” this problem, but my understanding is that issues like hallucination are fundamentally unsolvable: you might get fewer hallucinations in a better model, but that just means that those hallucinations that slip through will be better-concealed and even harder to identify in code review or happy-path testing.

Maybe – maybe – the trajectory of GPTs is infinite, and they’ll keep getting “smarter” to the point at which this doesn’t matter: programming genuinely will become a natural language exercise, and nobody will need to write or understand code at all. In this possible reality, the LLMs will eventually develop entire new programming languages to best support their work, and humans will simply express ideas and provide feedback on the outputs. But I’m very sceptical of that prediction: it’s my belief that the mechanisms by which LLMs work has a fundamental ceiling – a capped level of sophistication that can be approached but never exceeded. And sure, maybe some other, different approach to AI might not have this limitation, but if so then we haven’t invented it yet.

Which suggests that we will always need experienced engineers to shepherd our AIs. Which brings us back to the fundamental question: if everybody uses AI to code, how do we make new senior developers?

I have other concerns about AI too, of course, some of which I’ve written about. But this one’s top-of-mind today, thanks to Minas’ excellent article. Go read it to learn more about how physics research faces a similar threat… and, perhaps, consider how your own field might need to face this particular challenge.

The Lost Art of the Amusing WiFi Hotspot Name

Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just “fun” ones.

Has this art form died? Most residential SSIDs nowadays seem to just be the default one that comes with the basic router supplied by the ISP. Most commercial ones are just the name of the business. Sometimes you’ll spot a phone configured for tethering but even that’s usually just “Alice’s iPhone” or similar.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a “Chicken Crossed the Road to Steal Our Wifi” or a “Russian Hackers” or a “Routy McRouterface” or a “All Your Bandwidth Belong to Us” (okay, that last one’s a bit dated). Has the art form died?

Woof! Burglars!

The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture?

F-Day plus 55

It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability.

Today, we make a change. Today we’re moving into a medium-term let: sonewhere we can stay for the… say… six months or so it’ll take to actually repair our house so we can move back in. We’ll have our own space again in a way we haven’t in a couple of months.

I know the hard work isn’t done. Our house is still a wreck! But it feels like, perhaps, we’re beginning the second act of the three-act play “The Year Of The Flood”. And that feels like progress.

Right, I’d better go move house! (for like the seventh time this year…)

Indian Food

On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.

Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian: