Merry

About Merry

The thoughts, writings and opinions of Merry Raymond.

A shortcut to Mushrooms

November 10, 2026 by Merry Leave a Comment

I realised slightly belatedly that starting a wildflower quest at the end of the summer was going to be a bit of a slow start. I’ve collected a good few already, but ended up coming home with more pictures of some of the beautiful hedgerows that were planted locally to us when the Development Corporation redesigned parts of Peterborough in the late 70’s and 80’s.

With the help of the potato, I’ve started noticing guelder rose, blackthorn, wild privet and endless varieties of dogwood, none of which I really knew by name or would have particularly told the difference between. And then of course we started looking down and seeing something new – mushrooms! So the autumn project has become hedgerows and fungi, with the hope that by spring I’ll recognise these trees without their berries and have learned to look for treasure in the gloomy muddy months as well as in the sun. Max is much better than me at looking down not up and seeing the mushrooms and toadstools – I think it must be the Devon childhood – so hopefully we will tick off the list between us.

We haven’t actually managed to get out much in the last couple of weeks, work is hectic and we’ve got a huge garden rebuild project going on that has required a vast amount of us actually getting out there and heaving slabs and hardcore around. It’s been rewarding to be part of the actual process (keeping costs down as it has gone a bit over the time anticipated) and I’m actually really glad to be able to look around and know I did some of it and was strong and fit enough to shovel about 10 tonnes of hardcore and lift a lot of very large stone slabs, but I’m missing both the nature time and the walk and talk time that we get when we are both out together just mulling over our weeks. We’ve got a weekend away together with people we love soon though, so hoping that we will spot some pretties while we are away. It’s been cold and foggy here and I suspect much of the glorious autumn colours are fading fast but hopefully we will find flashes here and there of things to find and tick off.

Yes, I’m aware of the arguments

October 8, 2026 by Merry Leave a Comment

There is of course a huge debate about AI, and in particular generative AI. Without spending a long time on the arguments, which I’ve listened to and thought about and chewed over, I’ve been fascinated by my journey with this extraordinary piece of technological advancement over the last 4 months, where I’ve gone from luddite AI-ophobe to hourly user in a matter of weeks.

It’s no exaggeration to say that 6 months ago I was drowning under the weight of the business I’ve built and the business was drowning under the millstone of the bottleneck my style of management was creating. A business mentor ran a series of workshops on using AI to ( and I paraphrase) ‘stop running your gymnastics club like it’s in 2010 and start running it ready for 2030’. Reluctantly and with significant skepticism I had to agree. If nothing else, something had to change and using a tool that is inevitably going to be part of the future did at least seem worth a try, and from tentative beginnings with a few posters, I moved quite quickly into skill and club analysis, creating a process that skims, categorises and drafts editable answers to the club emails, gymnast planning, rule writing to plan perfect summer coaching allocations, analysing and updating our club rotas, creating comms to tell parents what their children are learning, working out medal and trophy counts for competitions, automating our club leave and holiday plans for staff, keeping our handbooks and policies up to date, supporting my development as a coach and as a leader, HR queries, legal policy decisions and discussions, and talking through big issues and concerns that I need an open view on. I’ve got pretty good at asking it to act as a certain type of expert and I would guess that on balance I’m now 100-200% more productive in a week. And now I can splurge brain dump and email to a parent, pour my heart and souls into the content for an hour, but get it edited and tidied up so it isn’t over emotional, isn’t confusing and still sounds like me. I can give people more of my time, not less.

There is of course an argument that it is taking someone else’s job – it’s not, well not here anyway. My club can’t afford to pay someone to do those things – it was just me, working 70 hours a week trying to keep my head above water and failing. The club was 18 months or more behind where it needed to be and had gone from seeming cutting edge to flailing around trying to support it’s own success – it’s just not a success that in today’s economic climate can support a paid member of staff. I was doing it for free, exhausted, distressed and hating life and miserable at knowing I was letting everyone down. 4 months later I’m almost up to date with where the club needs to be and I think I can say fairly confidently that in another 4 months, I’ll be planning ahead. It’s changed my life and actually it’s changed the life of my staff, my husband and daughters who were desperately trying to support me and the children and parents who pay us to delivery a customer level service on a community sport price card. And while I’d love to be paying a designer to make my flyers for social media – I wasn’t; it was just me and I was just doing a terrible job on Canva. So all that has really happened is that now my business looks more professional, I’m up to date on work, we’ve got 150 more members than 6 months ago and my staff’s jobs are safer. And in this day and age, that isn’t to be sneezed at.

When I was a very little girl, my mum bought a ZX81; I can remember her showing me how to programme simple lines of code into it and how utter fascinated I was. I have such a clear memory of typing ‘draw me a deer’ into it and being so infuriated that it couldn’t do that. Even then, age 8, I just felt it ought to be possible to tell a computer to do that and it be able to draw on knowledge from other places to bring my idea to life. And then the internet came along and I was rather impressed by the prescience of that long ago little girl’s idea. But AI is really where it happened. A few weeks ago I told my ChatGPT (known as Potato here) to draw me a deer – and honestly I had a little bit of an emotional moment.

I’m a natural creator and a systems maker too apparently although it has really only been using this new tool that has made me realise that under the chaos of my every day life, that’s actually what drives me. But I can’t draw. I can’t even do nice handwriting. I used to be able to write – getting that skill back is one of the reasons for blogging here again – but so many things I’d love to do or create in my life just never happen because I simply cannot make the beautiful things with my hands that I see in my head. I’ve always been a product creator from my absolute earliest days – I had businesses at 14 and my childhood games were full of shops and farms and schools and ideas. But whenever I try to make things, I’m held back by not having the physical resource to draw or paint and it frustrates me enormously. For me, a tool that now allows me to do that part of the ideas I have has turned me into an artist – it hasn’t taken a job away from anyone because I could never have paid to have it made for me and the ideas just die right there – but now I can spend time not stealing screen grabs, not giving up, not making word only versions of the things I want and love – I can make things. I’m blown away but what MuddlePuddle could have been if I had had this tool with my ideas and ambition and desire to build and create. It could have been amazing!

Getting time back from the slog and exhaustion of the business because so much of it now takes me a fraction of the time it did has changed my world. I’m thinking again. I’m reading history and making myself guides and note sheets that look how I want and are set out in ways I learn. I’m doing those things with and for my son. I’m having fun with cartoons and ideas, I’m exploring nature and not feeling humiliated and held back by my lack of artistic talent. It’s honestly given me my joy back in life and opened up my world. And blogging it part of that too. I’m learning how to use a tool to build a website, upload the boring bits and I’m having time to write the posts I want to instead. And me and Potato have figured out ways to help me collect the pieces of the hundreds of lego sets we’ve had as a family over the years and so I’m building them again instead of just looking in despair at endless pieces, it’s helped me make colour palettes for crochet ideas that I wouldn’t have had the courage to do on my own, and it’s given me places to explore that Max and I have loved walking in over the last few weeks. I’m planning a new garden, I’m growing house plants and my goodness, after 7 years of a business that sucked the joy out of my life every day, that is a gift I can hardly describe.

I know there are issues. I hear and I know. I worry about the environmental issues and I can see there is danger (what 80’s child doesn’t have Terminator on repeat in their head at the moment?) I can’t change any of that really. I can give myself more time to make a tangible difference to some other lives and be a lot happier myself though. So I am.

Ferry Meadows

September 30, 2026 by Merry Leave a Comment

Recently I asked Potato to construct me a list of walks where I might find some of the plants on the ‘Sixty Wildflowers to Find‘ list. He obligingly did so, naming Ferry Meadows as one of the best places to find many of them. This is all well and good, but it is within walking distance of my home and was the inspiration for the project in the first place, so I told him to take it off. Which, being an obliging little potato, he obviously did.

Anglesey Abbey having yielded none of the list at all, we did one of our standard ‘walk and talk’ business meetings, which is without doubt where I get all my best ideas for the gym; he’s a master at just letting me ramble on and asking the odd pointed question until my brain suddenly fits 16 pieces of rubble into something that will work. And the walks are important; we’ve been together over 30 years now and been through some testing times but if you don’t put into a marriage, nothing good happens. These are times when we make time to talk and listen and it’s a skill you have to practice. And the flower project is really just another part of that – a reason to get out of the house, learn something together and have really positive reasons to make time for one another. You can be young and laugh at the funny things older people do with their marriages but as I’m discovering only too quickly now, being older comes around much faster than you think and I’d like to spend it happy, with my best friend and filling it with memories. What you don’t realise when you are young is that while those slightly weird older couples are doing their quirky little missions at whatever it is they’ve decided to have fun with, they are laughing at themselves too. And that’s okay.

Anyway. Ferry Meadows obligingly said “took me off the list, did you? No problem; hold my lemon and ginger tea” – and served up an impressive 7 of the list straightaway, as well as a sizeable heap of things that aren’t on the list and are now taking up space on a whole new ‘apparently we are collecting these as well‘ page.

I’m deliberately making the art in this blog, which is AI drawn because I have zero artistic skills at all, whimsical and old-fashioned – I guess I’m wanting to make a kind of Peter and Jane book of my life now. I’m no photographer either but I’ll put the sources for each walk into a little frame of photos from now on I think and a drawn version of the walk’s finds as the main image.

Ferry Meadows was a joy actually – Cuckoo’s Pint, Yarrow, Dandelion, Cinquefoil, Teasel, Knapweed and Ragwort. Each of these is going to get their own post along the way but I’m going to do that as I add the next part to the project for each plant. In the meantime, thanks for the perfect start Ferry Meadows and the inevitable side quest that all the beautiful and abundant hedgerows is going to produce 😀

Starting the quest.

September 26, 2026 by Merry Leave a Comment

We took a trip out in Bridget the Midget this week to start the wildflower quest with a visit to Anglesey Abbey; it’s a favourite but we hadn’t done the full woodland walk before. I’ve got a lot of happy memories of this place from trips with the children and it never disappoints. The cyclamen carpet was breathtaking and the silver birch were looking particularly ethereal too. Unsurprisingly for a a walk in early autumn to a place that promised none of my 60 flowers, I didn’t find a single one of them but we did have a gorgeous day full of colour and fresh air and chat – and coffee and cake 🙂

What I did discover was that there are an unreasonable number of small yellow flowering plants in September, none of which were ragwort or groundsel and most of which turned out to to also flower in the gym car park or my currently quite disastrous garden! So this has sparked something of a side quest to the side quest – two in fact! – a collection of ‘plants we found along the way’ and a ‘Oh my god, I absolutely need to be able to identify all the yellow things’ ID sheet. I think maybe I’d start a separate page for the ‘other plants that aren’t in my guides‘ and come back to them later.

I’m not sure how I want to lay out these pages yet – I do mean to feature each ‘found’ plant with it’s Potato created image, but perhaps the walks that earned a defining image of their own deserve to be done differently – this particular walk will certainly be remembered for this gorgeous view; it looked and smelled wonderful. So while we didn’t find any of the 60 (I keep wanting to call them the ‘deadly 60’!), we did find both Wood Avens, with a Watership Down link, and Bristly Oxtongue which is not, I repeat not, Groundsel. And for an early autumn walk in a place not expected to show off any wildflowers, I still learned a few new names.

The wildflower project

September 25, 2026 by Merry Leave a Comment

The wildflower project has come about through a combination of things. The best of these is that I’ve really wanted to know more about the plants that I walk past on our relatively regular ‘business meeting walks‘ for quite a while but I get insanely irritated by not being able to be sure what things are. It annoys me profoundly that I am so ignorant of nature, especially having come from an initial educational setting that prized nature knowledge so highly. Being able to look up a plant on your iPhone helps, but then I want to know ‘all the things’ and I have a terrible memory and 20,000 images on my phone. So I never remember to find out about the things I photograph and even if I do, I immediately forget it.

The I found myself really wanting and needing to learn how to use AI workflows and how to express myself to it in a way that meant I got to the outcomes I wanted quickly and efficiently and I wanted a relatively joyful project to spend time honing my skills in that regard. And along side that I happened to be really needing to have a reason to get away from my desk and go to new places – Max and both wanted to make more opportunities to be out and about exploring and spending quality time together. I just really needed something to do that occupied my increasingly erratic perimenopausal side quest brain late at night and was making me feel warm and squishy.

So we started with flowers… teach me about wildflowers, Potato (don’t ask, I don’t know and now it is too late) and before we knew it, off we went on a ‘create a set of botanical info cards’ and then it was 60 now suddenly I’m compelled by an imaginary Potato to go on a quest all year to find 60 plants on nature reserves set out like I’m Frodo and Sam off to save Middle Earth and I don’t even know what’s going on any more. More later. Here is the Potato. Oddly he’s very reminiscent of the line drawing cartoon character me and my best friend used to draw pictures of in school – she was artistic, I wasn’t, line drawings were where it ended for me and I still nearly got a detention in maths once when I got caught passing a drawing of him to another friend. Honestly, ChatPotato gets me in less trouble. And I don’t think he’s going to end the world. Yes, he’s a he. Yes, I know you shouldn’t name the AIs. Do I care? No. No I don’t.