I think it's hilarious that they just let me play with a £150k Nexus 9000 stack at work, like it's fucking Roblox or something.

"Here you go EB, figure that one out, all it's doing is connecting our core network with our VM servers and SAN, no pressure! Documentation? Naaah, we never had any of that..."

I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.

Me… I don’t really know what happened. As a child, the more I was told to be normal, the more I dug my heels in, not out of contrarianism but out of a still indefatigable conviction that all of these people were wrong.

And the proof lies in the pudding. I am in my 40s, still a child, still stop to explore incessantly, still enjoy poking things with a stick, still finding joy, still being told to just for the love of god be normal, when will you get a proper job, settle down and become a banker or a lawyer or a doctor, and all that jazz.

Maybe it’s just the (until recently undiagnosed) ADHD talking - maybe I have been graced with a surfeit of good luck - but I’m pretty content with how being a cast iron weirdo panned out.

On the remembrance of childhood, much of it is clear to me - and now that I have a toddler of my own, I so often find her doing X or Y and going “good god, I remember being that kid”. Her other doesn’t remember her childhood at all, and struggles to relate - whereas I’ll gleefully fill my pockets with sand and run around hooting Yankee Doodle at full blast. It’s fun. People don’t have enough fun.