Theoretically, paying monthly for a service should be 12 small decisions and paying annually (or once) should be one big decision. Except it isn’t, is it? Paying monthly for something is one small decision followed by nothing…inaction.

That’s why businesses prefer subscriptions - because they turn initial interest into regular money, rather than one-off money. Then they’re banking on the fact that you don’t want to re-evaluate all your subscriptions regularly, and the hassle of doing something (cancelling them) is more than the hassle of doing nothing.

However, you’ll also find most SaaS companies will give you a discount if you pay for the year upfront. That way they get all the money in now and take out the risk of you cancelling early on, but still get to stick you on a subscription and take your money next year unless you remember.

The gap between monthly and annual pricing should be pretty informative in a well run business - letting you know about how much the company values immediate money and how wary they are of immediate churn, versus their ability to have customers stick around.

This morning I got woken up early (6:15am) and headed downstairs with the one-year-old to wait for the onslaught. An onslaught that arrived at 7am on the dot with the four-year-old making her way downstairs, closely followed by her big brother. A one-year-old is chaotic. All three of them together is something else.

But for a brief moment we sat in a line on the sofa, my arms around all of them. Then we went and had breakfast together. We sang silly songs and the baby banged pots and pans and the six-year-old talked my ear off while the four-year-old did gymnastics as I tried to get her to eat.

It was wonderful exhausting chaos.

When I’m old and the kids have grown up and flown the nest and I’m echoing round whatever house I live in, I’m going to look back on mornings like this one and wish for it back. This is current me letting future me know that I knew this was privilege and even if you think that you took it for granted, you didn’t.

I’ve written book reviews before but I know books. Like really know books. Whereas I think this is the first film I’ve seen in the cinema since…maybe Snail and the Whale and Zog with the children a couple of years ago. Before that, it was probably Mamma Mia 2 in Stockholm, with a live singer and my wife, 3 days pregnant (or at least, that’s when she’d taken the test) with our first child.

Now he’s six, so I’m somewhat out of practice with the cinema. I should fess up - I’ve never read the Odyssey. I’ve tried to read Ulysses at least three times and failed. I didn’t watch any trailers, or subscribe to any internet outrage. I went in blind.

However, muse, let me sing a song of what I saw…

Not a film review

I enjoyed it.

A tad more

Fine. It was epic and expansive and visually impressive. It was bigger than any film I’ve seen before. I liked the story and was invested by the end. I loved Odysseus wrestling with what he’d done, and how that had changed the world. I liked the gods and their role in the story. I loved that it wasn’t really a “fight” movie, and that the hero couldn’t beat the mythical monsters he encountered.

I don’t think I can justify going to the cinema all that often, but I’m glad I took my chance while I could. The question really, is whether or not I’ll try to read the Odyssey now. I think I’ll try.

But each time, I just pulled up in a marked parking space along the high street and got out and went shopping. And if there hadn’t been any spaces, I’d have driven round the corner to the free car park where there would have been. Both times, I thought “this is great” and “I’m sure glad I don’t have to pay for parking”.

Parking in Ripon or Knaresborough (don’t even get me started on York) is usually a hassle of finding a space, then finding a meter that’s working, then working out how long you’re going to be. None of that nonsense in Boroughbridge, and as a result I’m more likely to go.

I don’t know who decides these things, and why Boroughbridge is allowed free parking and the other places aren’t, but it’s great for me and I bet it’s great for Boroughbridge. So well done, person who decides that.

One day I’ll write about raising boys and how that’s different today than it was 30 years ago, and why it’s strange to see the word “masculinity” without the word toxic before it. But today is not that day. Today I’d like to talk about dudes being dudes.

It’s good that they’re smiling

My six-year-old son, no doubt encouraged by his metal-loving father, is really into power metal. Swords ringing, dragon slaying, battle pumping power metal. My wife is generally bemused but accepting: you parent the child you have, and our child loves Dragonforce and Majestica. In fairness, she spent at least some time at University watching me play rock in various bands so this is sort of on her…

My son and I were watching the video above (Diggy Diggy Hole by Wind Rose) and my wife was surprised (but happy) to find that the band were all smiling and laughing while playing. It’s something that’s sat with me, and I think I now understand why.

New listeners to metal tend to imagine angry serious men playing angry serious songs, and sometimes that’s true. Sometimes, dudes are angry and that’s OK.

But sometimes, a group of men who have known each other for years and become masters of their instruments get together and have fun. They write fun songs that sound cool. The songs lets you imagine yourself as a band of brothers going on a quest. You come together and achieve something greater than the sum of your parts. You make something. And then, you go on stage in front of thousands of people and shout “are you ready, brothers? Will you fight with me?” and they all scream with you. Fun? What could be funner?

So yes, the band are all smiling, and so am I. My son loves it, too, and it was great to see my wife start to realise why.

I shouldn’t need to say it but I will anyway…what a hero! Imagine…a 1-year-old who believes chaos is his calling card. A 4-year-old who can strop with the best of them and will be high on sugar from minute one. And the noisiest 6-year-old yet invented.

What will I be doing with my freedom? Well, so far it looks like it’s going to be pretty gentle. I ghost around the eerily silent house. Why bother turning lights on if it’s just me?

So far I’ve done a fair amount of work, a little bit of PhD, a little bit of writing, a tiny bit of guitar, and a bit of tidying. I’ve made poor dietary decisions, and been to the shop to lock in yet more poor dietary decisions. I’ve been to the gym to maintain a sense of normality. But that’s just been Thursday and half of Friday. The weekend is likely to be quieter still.

I thought I’d go to bed late and get up late…and I was half right. For some inexplicable reason, I was up at 5:40 and again at 7. Well…maybe it’s not inexplicable. Maybe I’m old and broken now…too many mornings of early waking have turned me (unwillingly, I should add) into a morning person. By 8am I’d showered, breakfasted and was working.

On at least one of the days, I want to do something that I otherwise wouldn’t/couldn’t. At the moment my best idea is to go to the cinema but I’m open to finding inspiration from elsewhere. On another day, I want to see if I can go the whole day without speaking once.

At the pub again for a bit of outside working and the beef brisket sandwich is delightful. Ta ta.

Except it didn’t happen like that at all. My six-year-old and four-year-old spend every morning out there doing “gladiator training”. While they flail around with foam swords, my one-year-old crawls around between them squealing with delight. The big one throws a large bouncy ball on to act as an oversized football and yet more chaos ensues. As I put the baby to bed at night I can hear the faint squeaking of springs as the eldest two bounce away the last of their energy.

Now the trampoline serves as a reminder. A permanent reminder that I am a bad judge of what we should buy: an irrational economic actor. A reminder to buy the kids things they say they desperately want. I gazed up to the sky. I had won a victory over myself. I had learned to love big brother trampoline.

Except now my wife wants to buy the kids a big play-frame and surely they’ll just grow bored of it and the park is nearby and what’s wrong with climbing trees or the trampoline?

I love learning about history - particularly history that helps you see our current world better. Walking through English villages and being able to explain why there are lots of houses from a given time period, or why schools might or might not exist, or where a pub’s name comes from…I just like the feeling of everything being built upon something, and spying the ‘something’ from between the cracks.

The Proud Tower promises that it’ll cover world history (or, Anglophone and Western European history) in the years before the first world war. This is a period that I’ve not read a huge deal about, and certainly not in isolation. The introduction though - well, it’s already a gem.

Tuchman says that she is going to move beyond the “golden age” narrative, explaining that that narrative only took off after the World War - that it was people looking back at the war, and the time before the war, and painting a picture of opulence and joy that was absent from contemporary accounts of the period.

Isn’t that just wonderful? Of course, after 4 years of terrible hardship and barely imaginable slaughter, people’s recollections of what came before that are going to be suspect. I wonder how many historical narratives fall into exactly the same pattern: a dark time leads people to re-evaluate and wonder “didn’t we have it good, then?”

I see it in politics, where I’m old enough to remember the derision that was poured on Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. Now, it’s in vogue to remark on how good we had it, when we compare those to “the current lot”. I also wonder how much of this effect we see when people say that school years are your best, or that teenagers don’t know how good they have it.

To an extent, I agree that school years can be your best - little responsibility, long days spent with your friends, learning and growing and discovering the world…what’s not to like? Well. If I remember rightly, quite a lot. Teenagers don’t think being a teenager is the best thing ever, and they’ve probably got quite a good argument as to why it isn’t. New parents don’t often think looking after a 1 year old is the best thing ever…but parents of teenagers often do.

We normalise the wonders of our position, and acutely feel the challenges such that we remember our past more fondly and struggle with the limitations of our present. When I think of my life pre-children, I romanticise the elements that are unattainable now: the travel, the free-time, meals out. Freedom. At the time, I’m sure I lamented the travel, filled my free-time with projects, and never ate out.

What’s all that got to do with history? Tuchman says she’s only going to focus on contemporaneous accounts, in order to avoid this bias. She says that it’s hard to square the idea of the first world war emerging from such opulence, peace and joy…clearly the world wasn’t all sunshine and daisies. Sunshine and daisies don’t lead to the Great War.

I’m looking forward to seeing what was happening.

I’m mainly shutting myself away in the annexe and working a crazy amount of hard - lots of LLM-assisted data work, none of which really gives me the time to gather.

At some point, we’ll find a new balance but as the activities continue (swimming and taekwondo aren’t stopping during the summer, and dancing is still on for a week or two) and the work piles up, I’m aware that my wife is likely to reach breaking point sooner or later.

Next week there’s tennis camp which might help (taking 2 children out of the equation for a few hours) but then a mega-trip up to her parents with all the children for up to 5 days. Pray for her, dear reader. Pray for her.

I have to decide whether to do something outlandish (fly to New York/Pisa/somewhere for a week), slightly landish (train to Oxford, go back to Chesterfield), or perfectly vanilla (maybe get a takeaway one night). For now, I haven’t planned anything so I’m tending towards the latter but you never know.

Let this serve as a reminder - the 49 days of the summer holidays started well and frantically, and I’m impressed with my wife’s ability to handle it. Long may it continue.

There were 20 people (I think), most of whom I haven’t seen since the last wedding/funeral. It was great. Food, drink. Catching up.

I used to be in bands with my cousins and we had a drum set and a guitar set up and got to have a little jam and that was so much fun. I couldn’t play guitar any more (which is pretty upsetting) - my fingers remembered some of it, but if I had to actually think about what I was playing, I was lost. My six year old was shocked and wanted to know how I knew how to play guitar and how I was so good…I didn’t have the heart to explain to him that I’d just let myself down. One of today’s jobs…getting the guitar out of the loft and getting back into it!

Aside from all of that shared history (at least 3 years of band practices every weekend, and least 5 years of shared meals at grandma’s house every Wednesday), it was beautiful to be able to point my kids to all the people around them and tell them they have family. Big family. Proper family.

I remember going to a family party as a kid (somewhere between 6 and 9 years old) and being told to look around, and that everybody here was related to me. I found it mad, and often thought back to it. I hope my kids do the same. It’s important to know that there’s a bigger unit, and that there are people around who don’t know you but who still have your back. People who have never (or rarely) met you who are at least partially invested in your success.

It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. And now I need to go off and get my guitar so I can be useful and next year’s big family gathering (in the hope they become semi-regular things!)