Musings

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 😀

The Gallery – Colour

April 23, 2015 by Merry 4 Comments

This is a hard project to stop. It's been very therapeutic. Part of me wants to square it (but how?) and another part just wants to keep going. I adore it. #ZenMandalaProject #crochet #crochetmandala #FrithaMandala — This is a hard project to stop. It’s been very therapeutic. Part of me wants to square it (but how?) and another part just wants to keep going. I adore it. #ZenMandalaProject #crochet #crochetmandala #FrithaMandala

I’m entirely artistically inept, with no ability to put pen to paper or paint on canvas and conjure up a world of sensory delight.

If my art lies anywhere, it is probably in words.

When it comes to colour, the theory isn’t in my head – at least no further than that half completed colour wheel I failed to hand in on time in 2nd year. Orange and Blue, Red and Green, Purple and Yellow.

And design is perhaps not my strong point either; I’m impatient, hurried, a botcher of work and a shover in of ends. Completer finisher has never been my strength

But making, learning to wind colour together using simple stitches, now that has opened up a world of colour magic possibilities to me. My under bedside is stuffed full of boxes bursting our with balls of colour waiting to be turned into something beautiful – or beautiful enough for me. I’ve taken to having baskets of yarn I like and colours that might suit a project soon scattered around the house – and it is funny how much even a basket of potential project can turn into something that lifts and room and adds a spot of jazz.

The husband calls it crochet mess. I call it installation art 😉

I’ve always been rather staid in colour choices, overly tasteful for fear I’ll overdo it (as previous attempted dramatic decor has had a tendency towards) but learning to let go in small and recoverable makes has unleashed such delight in colour.

It’s unleashed the artist in me, just a little. I’m rather nervous of her and keep expecting her to get laughed at. Ever since the wild sanity blanket, I’ve tended to stick with muted shades and grown up designs. And funnily enough, it’s even teaching me to finish what I start. I still tend towards throwing colour together in an artless jumbled but these days, more often, I’m pleased with the result. I’m even starting to have the nerve to work out my patterns properly and share them. The riot of colour in this mandala is the biggest ‘let go’ I’ve ever done and the first time I’ve ever had the confidence in my design to get people to try out something I’ve made.

The Fritha Mandala is currently in testing with some friends. It’s almost like having a baby. A very colourful one.

This post was written for The Gallery.

The Gallery – Green.

March 20, 2015 by Merry 2 Comments

I don’t have enough green in my life. I don’t get out enough, I forget to put plants in my house (and they aren’t much fun if small boys tend to pull them over anyway) and there isn’t the budget for cut flowers either. I’m so grumpy that I don’t live somewhere lovelier that I probably do lose out on the outside I do have.

There isn’t a green room in my house. There is a sage green, but I forget to go in it and I’m about to turn it sunshine yellow.

So when I looked around my – blue – bedroom yesterday, I wasn’t expecting to find inspiration for green.

What does green even mean to me?

It’s a garden I haven’t made beautiful.

A Dartmoor I don’t live in.

Trees that sometimes make me smile, but it is always a wistful smile.

This week it is also a yarn I have run out of.

But it is also the colour I assigned to Bene back when he was a hope of a bump called Marmite and it is a colour my husband always chooses when we play games.

And, so it turns out, it was the dominant colour in the heap of tat that is on my chest of drawers, dumped in passing by children, picked up off the floor to save sleepy midnight feet.

Random asdortment of green from my chest of drawers — Random assortment of green from my chest of drawers.

The yarn is ready for an April peace mandala crochet project, the pens come from a rep who has become a friend and who I love like an uncle, the thread I wound on to that card when I was pregnant with Freddie. The bracelet I made on a holiday with friends when I was pregnant with Freddie. The bottle was sent by a kindly brand after I lost my CybHer bag.The bookmark comes from my dad in Egypt. The cold remedies and tissues sum up the last few weeks, the tree is Josie’s and there is a faded out bottle of fabric blue, a deodorant that I altered to from spray after my breast lump scare last year.

And a little green car, one of the most precious possessions of one small boy.

I quite like green.

This post is for The Gallery, on the Sticky Fingers blog.