Writing this from the Eurostar, rattling towards London and attempting to wrestle with the train’s wifi, which is so weak it’s essentially connectivity homeopathy. Between the Chunnel and the capital it fades in and out like the Shipping Forecast at 3am — present, then gone, leaving you wondering if you imagined it.
So while this weeknote is being written at 300km/h, the chances of publishing it before I reach my hotel are roughly the same as Liz Truss winning Come Dine With Me.
Which feels about right for the week: a mix of progress and interruptions, abrupt disconnects, nostalgia trips and pop-culture distractions, and just enough signal to piece it all together.
This week at work
Mostly the book, which at this stage is less “writing” and more “wrestling a many-headed hydra of Word documents, where every sentence I cut seems to sprout two more.” Some chapters are coming together nicely; others still resemble the digital equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom, all half-finished thoughts and discarded drafts lurking under the bed with a feint yet troubling pong. I’ve spent most of the week coaxing the mess into something resembling structure — deleting, rewriting, then deleting again, until the only thing growing is my word count of expletives.
Writing a book is good practice for life: you don’t always get the response you want, and sometimes whole sections end up on the cutting room floor.
I’ve been playing around with what I’ve started calling Jessica’s Law (blame too much Murder, She Wrote as a student). Every episode hinged on Means, Motive, Opportunity — and it turns out the same applies to comms. Instead of starting with a channel audit (“what do we already provide?”), we begin with Discovery: do people actually have the means to get messages, the opportunity to pay attention, and the motive to care? Get that right, then audit channels against reality, not the other way round. Or, as Jessica Fletcher would put it: you don’t catch the culprit by counting the guns in the cupboard.
Client work was quieter, which is probably just as well: fewer calls, more time to wrestle with sentences that stubbornly refuse to line up in the right order. It doesn’t look glamorous from the outside — mostly it’s me in front of a screen muttering like a minor Shakespearean villain — but progress is being made. Slowly.
Also this week
I spent a couple more days in Finland, including a wander round the fortress island of Suomenlinna — all cobbles, cannons and salt air. The highlight came as a vast ferry sliding improbably through a narrow channel on its way to Tallinn, a floating hotel edging past the old battlements with inches to spare. Standing there, you get a sense of how the island has always been a stage for comings and goings — invaders, traders, and now overnight-trippers in search of cheaper alcohol, all passing through the same strait.
Back in Amsterdam, it was one of those rare, lovely weeks where every evening seemed to fall gently into place with friends. A cup of tea at a friend’s house on my way home from the airport. A couple of casual gezellig nights in the local pubs. Nothing grand, just the kind of easy evenings that make a week feel full without being hectic. Having friends nearby — cobbling them together into a sort of substitute family — is a vastly underrated life hack, and one I’m very grateful for.
On Friday I caught up with my old friend Senab, in town for a gig (she’s now a professional singer, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds). We first met as teenagers thanks to one of those ridiculous sliding-doors moments. Picture it: I’m 14, stuck at home on a rainy Saturday, half-watching Channel 4 when a short documentary about a youth journalism programme in New York comes on. At the end, they announce they’re running a London pilot. Applications available… by stamped addressed envelope. Peak 90s.
Weeks later I’m in the Guardian’s Farringdon offices, learning how to interview from real journalists. By the end of the summer I’d blagged my first byline. More importantly, I’d fallen in with a group of people who blew my world wide open: different backgrounds, different aspirations, different everything. It gave me confidence, a social circle that wasn’t just girls from school, and the audacity to think journalism (or something like it) might be for me.
Senab and I talked about how that one project sent so many of us off on entirely new paths — she onto stages, me into whatever this is. Others have ended up as academics, authors, artists and CEOs. Proof, not that any is needed, that sometimes your whole life pivots on the price of a 2nd-class stamp.
Consuming
👩🏻💻 Internetting
This week’s standout read was Shared Narratives by my friend Lauren Razavi. A gorgeous, layered essay about the private codes we build with people, and what happens when those codes spill out into the public. She drifts from playlists as love letters, to walking routes as relationship metaphors, to graffiti as a kind of intimacy that’s both public and secret.
What struck me most was her point that not everything needs to be spelled out. Some things are obvious, others are hiding in plain sight for those who know how to read the code.
📺 Watching
I watched Fit For TV, Netflix’s documentary series about The Biggest Loser. A grim time capsule from the early 2000s, when humiliating people on screen somehow counted as primetime entertainment. Contestants were starved, screamed at, pushed to collapse, all packaged as “inspiration.” Two decades on, the fallout is painful: lasting health problems, disordered eating, and the scars of being chewed up for ratings.
Midway through my own weight loss journey (why yes I do look great, thanks for noticing), it made for difficult viewing. The extremes on screen couldn’t feel further from what I’m doing — but it was a stark reminder of how easily health gets twisted into punishment when there’s an audience involved.
📚 Reading
Nothing, unless you count the thousand-odd articles, reports and blog posts I’ve been mining for book references. After a week of scanning PDFs until the words stopped meaning anything, I couldn’t face opening an actual book. Making up for it next week, promise.
🎧 Listening
The Taylor Swift news this week sent the internet into a frenzy, and me straight back into my Swiftie playlists. Say what you like, but no one commercialises petty grievances and messy drafts of their personal life quite like Taylor. If I could monetise my deleted paragraphs the way Taylor monetises her exes, I’d be writing this weeknote from a yacht. Instead I am zipping through Kent, relying on a Taylor playlist and my noise-cancelling cans to block out the sound of a toddler kicking off.
Coverage
This week my latest piece for Reworked went live: a look at what AI intranets mean for internal comms.
Once upon a time, our big worry was whether Q3 results sounded better as “steady performance” or “poised for growth.” Now the real challenge is making sure that update doesn’t get mangled into a beige push notification by a bot that can’t parse sarcasm.
AI intranets are here, which means your carefully crafted content won’t stay in one neat format. It’ll be sliced, summarised, translated and pushed out in ways you can’t always predict. The job of comms isn’t disappearing — it’s shifting. From writing the perfect headline to orchestrating the whole ecosystem: tagging, structuring, and making sure the meaning survives the journey.
Far from replacing us, this is AI politely shoving us up the value chain and making the job more interesting.
Travel
I’m in London all week, swapping Amsterdam canals for campus libraries. I’ll be holed up at Goldsmiths (where I did my undergrad) and at Senate House, where I wrote my dissertation two decades ago. Looking forward to a bit of student nostalgia — the long days in the stacks, the smell of old books, and the faint sense I should probably be revising for something (and yet choosing to knock off and meet friends for wine instead) This time, at least, the deadlines are self-inflicted.
This week in photos
Sharon O'Dea 