The roundup. May 2018
About the boy
May was all about the boy.
Zac was born on the 17th May – 9 days late but everything went smoothly this time around. Zac is our fourth child and joins his 3 older sisters in the expanding Holliday household.
FutureGov has a generous paternity leave allowance for a UK company – I was able to take 3 weeks off to spend with the family, and will have taken a month of paid leave by the summer. I’m really grateful for this time. It’s not time I had when our other children were born so it has felt like a genuine privilege to be at home and focussed on being with family without work distractions.
I’ve been keeping in touch with FutureGov while I was literally ‘holding the baby’ and it has been a good chance to reflect on the past couple of years of work and also to catch up on some reading – I’m planning to publish a spring/summer reading list soon and have already made my way through most of it.
The weather in the UK has been unusual and pretty special over the past month as well – 20+ degree temperatures every day for most of May – apparently the hottest May on record for over a hundred years in the UK. Zac is yet to wear trousers, or any substantive clothing for that matter, and is in for a shock when we get to September/October!
Footnote – I’m finishing this update late (in June) and have now returned to work. It’s school sports day tomorrow and summer really feels like it’s here. More usual service will resume next month.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.