Previously at the Volcano Base I’d been making a self-organising team. Since then I’ve been a bit under the weather, so I slowed down for a few days. All better now.

There's a goddess you've probably never heard of, which is fine, because she may not have entirely existed.

Eostre - or Ostara, depending on which early medieval monk you're getting your mythology from - was supposedly the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. The Venerable Bede mentioned her once, in passing, in the eighth century, and historians have been arguing about her ever since. She might have been real. She might have been a convenient explanation for why Christians were still doing suspiciously pagan things in April.

Either way, the name stuck. Easter. Oestrogen. East - the direction the sun rises from. All of it rooted in the same ancient idea: that something returns. That warmth comes back. That the light, which had been making itself scarce, quietly resumes its duties.

We're very good, as a species, at taking old things and giving them new names. Sometimes to make the old thing more acceptable. Sometimes because we genuinely think we've invented something new, and only later notice the bones of something ancient underneath.

AI agents are a good example. We talk about them as if they arrived from nowhere, conjured from maths, code and hubris. But delegation is ancient. Memory is ancient. The division of labour predates written history. We've wrapped these things in a new festival, given them new names, and we're arguing about whether they're real - just like the historians arguing about Eostre.

They're real. The pattern was always there.

My marriage ended recently. The house - the family home - is on the market. And yet here we all are, still living in it together, waiting for the world's housing market to cooperate, suspended in a chapter that was supposed to be over by now.

It's a strange thing, living inside a transition that won't move. You can know, intellectually, that the next thing is coming. You can almost want it. And still find yourself stuck in the in-between, occasionally ambushed by grief at completely random moments, on the school run or in a 70s-style queue for petrol, for no particular reason.

And meanwhile: spring. The garden doing what gardens do. My kids growing in ways I didn't plan for and can't control. The world moving on its own schedule, indifferent to mine.

The season didn't ask if I was ready. It just changed the conditions.

The people who named Eostre - or whatever they called her before she had a name - weren't optimists. They were agricultural. They watched for signals. They read what the soil was actually doing, not what they'd hoped it would do, and they made decisions based on the conditions that existed rather than the ones they'd have preferred.

The conditions have changed. Not just personally, for me, in my strange suspended household. But professionally, for most of us. The way work gets done is shifting in ways that feel simultaneous and rapid and slightly hard to look at directly. New names on old patterns - delegation, memory, the division of labour - wearing unfamiliar clothes and moving faster than expected.

You don't have to have it figured out. But noticing that the ground has changed, that the light is different, that things which weren't possible last season are quietly becoming possible now - that's not nothing. That's the beginning of knowing what to plant.

I'm not ready. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be.

Happy Easter, if you celebrate it. Happy spring, if you don't. The season arrived on its own schedule, as it always does.

Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.

Someone handed Claude real money and access to the stock market to see what happens. It's less a financial experiment than a philosophical one - and worth watching not for the returns, but for what it reveals about how an AI reads uncertainty.

Why it matters: We're at the stage where "can it do this?" is being replaced by "let's find out." The answer, either way, is going to be instructive.

Rumours circling Apple's WWDC in June suggest the iPhone could be about to become a genuine AI control surface - with Siri potentially doing what it promised and never quite delivered. This video breaks down what's credible, what's wishful, and what it would actually mean.

Why it matters: If Apple gets this right, the most widely held device on earth becomes an ambient AI interface. That's not a feature update - it's a different relationship with your phone entirely.

Artemis II has launched. Four astronauts are making the journey that nobody has made since 1972, on hardware built by hundreds of thousands of people over years of painstaking work. It happened.

Why it matters: In a week where the news has been relentlessly grim and anxious, this is a useful reminder that our species is still capable of doing things that are genuinely, uncomplicatedly extraordinary.