Weeknotes by Mo Morgan

• The feeling of making progress seems to operate independently of progress itself. This is something of which I remind myself when working on the campervan conversion. Even though progress is happening all the time, it feels as if only sometimes there’s a step forward.
• In the middle of the van, there’ll be an upholstered bench either side. Both lift up to reveal… (more about that another time). They’ve been designed to be as light as possible. The downside is they’re not standalone, like regular furniture: they can’t be sat upon until the’re completely installed.
• This weekend I cleared most of the tasks that need to be done before the benches can be finished off, which feels like progress even though most of it is just fiddling about.
• Related: sometimes slide decks come together easily, other times it’s a real struggle. This week I’ve been flip-flopping between three presentations that are all proving difficult to write.
• Sunday night is a good time for a crime thriller, but not necessarily outside your own house. Drugs proliferate here. After a while you can recognise it everywhere, the way you might spot mail being delivered. Tatty, non-descript hatchbacks are commonly used, and one tore past while we were watching TV. Unfortunately for them, our road is a 180m dead end. Police cars piled in behind. One person was quickly detained, while officers went door-to-door and dogs went garden-to-garden presumably looking for another. All very lively for a school night. I hate it here.
• A good day filming for Lumino today. We have such a great community of talented and committed people, and I feel lucky every day. I said some vaguely coherent things on video, and looked gormless in stills. All in a day’s play.

• Engagement ring acquired, to her precise specifications. It’s a lovely sapphire on a band that screams deco.

• Went to see Fran Lebowitz on stage. One of those kinds of gifts you give to someone where you get to go too. Really good. A half-hour in dead-pan conversation with Fiona Lindsay, followed by questions from the audience. Her style has such a quick and seemingly effortless nature that it’s reminiscent of street magic.
• Bayer (yeah, you know, that thumping-great consumer health org) announced its partnership with Lumino, the start-up I co-founded. So that’s nice. This has been embargoed for a while, which has the effect of making the magnitude of it creep up on me from time to time. So I alternate between casual mention and holy shit. Anyway, onwards. ✊ Better mental health for everyone.
• Oh, and it’s my birthday. When I turned 40, I was writing a little newsletter and so took one edition to record 40 lessons from 40 years.
  • These things are often worded as if they’re advice to others but, as the first lesson states, people giving you free advice are talking to themselves. So this is me talking to myself about successes I want to build upon and mistakes I needn’t repeat.
  • I put a lot of thought into them; nearly all are backed by at least three data-points. At the time, I thought maybe I’d pick up one more each year and the list would continue to grow with me. In fact, each of these do not represent one year, but long-running themes.
  • Meanwhile, all the points remain largely true. They were not written in any kind of priority order, but what’s happening over time is that their relative importance is changing. The one that jumps off the page as proving evermore valuable is to “talk about mental health as often as you might about physical health”. The one that jumps off the page because I have struggled is the fourth: “cut out cancerous people quickly, actively seek out better ones”.
  • Maybe in a few years I might be able to capture a couple more. There’s certainly one currently on the boil concerning sacrifice in the name of principles. This is not an original thought, but a value isn’t a value unless it costs you something. Bill Bernbach phrased it as “More and more I have come to the conclusion that a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money”. And there are social and emotional costs too. So you can expect to see that in my list of 50.

Bass notes

[In which Mo learns the bass guitar]

• The bass is back! Andy the luthier finally made it through his backlog and did me a full setup. The E string now also has a machine head with a lever that drops it to a D, which on a short-scale bass is quite a fun and angry thing. The drop in string tension makes it more inclined to rattle the frets, which through the fuzz/overdrive pedals sounds incredible.

• I need to get back into regular practice. Five bursts a week seems to be optimal.

• Over Easter we began looking at engagement rings. I am glad not to have attempted to chose one unsupervised. Whatever I might have chosen would have counted against me. It’s not that my taste in these things is bad, it’s that she is looking for something with specific subtleties* that I am only now learning.
• My first sit-at-a-desk job was at a jewellery firm. Mainly, I was writing stock-control software. There was a window of time in the late Nineties there was no viable system capable of indexing such complicated products, let alone ones that can be so heavily customised or remade. So, I picked up a lot of the basics about jewellery. But since then a quarter-century has passed, so these are the things I’ve learned, or had forgotten, about engagement rings:
  • There are thousands of choices, but the vast majority are just small variations on one theme. You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. The industry has come to depend on offering basically the same ring at thousands of different price-points. Yet, if that’s not the kind of thing you’re after, you’ve got to try and find the vanishingly small number of rings that are different but also not horrible.
  • It’s possible to spend simply obscene, offensive amounts of money. Although not on sale, and definitely not to me, I held a ring that would retail for £163,000. If you are making millions and need to get a bunch of your money over an international border without too many questions, then I get it. If you want to make someone feel special, not so much. I was paranoid about dropping it, but for that money I’d want it it to stop falling a couple of inches off the ground and hover there until I scooped it back up.
• Anyway, the search continues. It might be that the stone is found first, and a ring is made for it. Or the ring might already be out there somewhere, waiting patiently in a haystack of wrong rings. I’m happy either way; no rush.
• Like everyone else, I’ve been fiddling with ChatGPT. I love it when it is willfully disobedient, such as when you give it a word-count to stick to and it not only ignores it, it insists it has done as commanded. The illusion of disobedience is an interesting evolution of the Turing test that I didn’t see coming.
• Stunningly, tragically true: The Lifecycle of An Advertising Agency.

*What an amazing word subtleties is. Having typed the above, I found myself staring at it. Such a funny-looking word, subtleties. Subtleties. Look at the state of it. I defy you not to say sub-tul-ties. Or subt-let-ees. Anyway.