January was hell but at least we created Baths largest nature reserve

In the run up to Christmas most folks are winding down, but I was winding up trying to get as much done as possible before people stop replying to emails. I was struggling to battle through a smattering of client work with broken boat and charity obligations kicking my feet out from under me, but I got a £500 stinky petrol/gas generator plugged into the boat and eventually powered through a thousand emails between tree planting days in named storms.

A week off was needed. Mexican-themed Friendmas with best friends, girlfriend, and sister. Some time in a hut with my partner and nothing around other than a wood-fired hot tub. Another week in the lakes going up stuff between cataclysmic storms.

It was the best of times but I had to rush back to Bath because "the land was coming on Monday!"

This 70 acre nightmare of a land purchase had cried wolf a thousand times over the last two years of trying to buy it, but as always I did my duty and rushed back to the boat, to make myself useful in any way I possibly could.

Monday 12th January 2026

Absolutely zero news.

Did about an hours client work and randomly ended up doing about three hours on the new OpenAPI.Tools relaunch.

Tools for working with OpenAPI | OpenAPI.tools

A comprehensive and open source list of resources for developers working with OpenAPI.

APIs You Won't HateAPIs You Won’t Hate

Mental state? Not ideal.

Tuesday 13th January 2026

Whilst waiting two years for the 70 acres to go through we found a few weeks to buy an 11 acre ancient woodland right next door to it, and today we went for a wander around with a forester to make a plan for what to do with it. Some coppicing of the hazel. Some ring barking on the dominating sycamore. Some thinning of the conifers. Some elms that are trying to regrow but being mauled by deer. The usual sort of work most ancient woodlands need.

I got back and checked my email for the 100th time to see about the rest of the land.

"We may have spoken too soon but they should be ready to complete any day now." – Solicitors

To avoid another 6 hours of refreshing my inbox I ended up rewriting the Protect Earth website in Astro to keep my mind off it. Looks like crap but it's pulling data from the API instead of the Squarespace mess it's stuck on right now, and a friend is going to restyle it.

Ended up roving around fixing some backend GIS issues for Future Forest Company too because I had to do something with no word from the solicitors. 🙃

I lost my mind and went to hang out at a local hotel, and met some wonderfully deranged boat people also avoiding their boat for various reasons (mainly due to being cold as balls).

Wednesday 14th January 2026

Desperate to fix my finances I locked myself in a cafe and worked on all sorts of random stuff for clients, like helping a few teams migrate from Stoplight (a company I poured my heart into that got binned off by capitalism) to Scalar (a bunch of scrappy underdogs who I like a lot).

Stoplight

Documentation page

Thursday 15th January 2026

I finally got some news! The sellers, who are not the quickest of operators at any point, had signed the contracts to complete on the land. This does not mean we have the land, but apparently it means we could be completing on Monday!

It had been a cold few days and I had run out of excuses to sleep anywhere other than the boat. It was 4.4°C when I got to it at 8pm, and whilst the wood fired stove was doing a good job of warming up the living room up to about 16°C, that sofa bed was meant for my 4 year old niece to sleep on not a grown ass man. The bedroom was not doing so well with a dodgy backboiler.

I had no funds to sleep elsewhere so I just wrapped myself in five blankets and went to bed, to continue working on the Protect Earth website rebuild until I fell asleep.

Friday 16th January 2026

Most of Friday I literally stayed in that exact position, cold as fuck, coding away trying to move the charity forwards until the man himself Julian came to help move my boat forwards. He finally got my leisure batteries working by cutting the dodgy starter battery out of a poorly schemed up "battery sharing" setup. This got my water pump working well enough to realize we had not more water in the tank, so we had no choice. Barge poll out. We are punting to the water hole 300 meters down the canal. Everyone on the towpath enjoyed it. I'm not sure Julian did. 🤣

With that nonsense over I had just enough time to drop Julian off, collect up a bunch of machetes and axes from storage, and drive to Wales for a hedgelaying course.

Saturday 16th January 2026

There's nothing more important to me than biodiversity, and as an ex system architect I always believe in skilling folks up so you can expand your influence beyond what can be done by you and your team alone. We can't lay every hedge in the country, but we can skill farmers up (for free) with course costs covered by hobbyists who are curious about the art. All of this keeps hedgelayers running the courses in business, and helps farmers who can't afford to hire them able to lay their own hedges instead of flailing A huge win win.

Our Hedge-Laying Courses and Why They Are Important. — Protect Earth

The History of Hedgerows UK hedgerows are an important part of the landscape and a haven for wildlife. After the Agriculture Act of 1947 was passed, up to half of our hedgerows (around 118,000 miles worth) have disappeared as politicians encouraged farmers to grown more and more food in an effort t

Protect EarthKathy Sturgeon

This was a helpful distraction from the ongoing land purchase, and the older folks who were a bit tired by the afternoon very much enjoyed watching me power through pleaching the fattest stems using nothing but a blunt hatchet and a plethora of unbridled rage.

Sunday 17th January 2026

I don't know what I did at this point I was losing my mind and went to go and visit a goat. They like brown Hula Hoops.

Apparently I did eight more hours on the website rebuild until about 3am. The pending deadline was continuing to affect my mental state.

Monday 18th, January 2026

THE BIG DAY.

I was back on the boat "ready" but the leisure batteries had cut out at 58% so they're clearly completely fucked. I got my phone charged up by 12:17 and had a few missed calls from the solicitors and other trustees. AGGH!

"Unfortunately the sellers are unable to complete today, because the tenant farmer [who has not been on the land for five years] has just remembered he has some sheep hurdles on the land, and we cannot exchange until they have been collected."

1. Googles what sheep hurdles are.
2. Remembers seeing like 8 of those rusty bastards on the land.
3. Starts making a few calls.

I politely called our solicitors asking if it would be a reasonable offer for me to handle it myself. They suggested calling the sellers agent.

I put on my big calm polite voice to call the sellers agent and kindly suggested I could help them remove those critically important items from the land at the upmost haste, and was willing to go there right now (with a whole 4% on my phone).

After a nail-biting wait I was informed the sellers tenants wifes sisters dogs hairdresser was able to join me in the field in 30 minutes, and whilst running up the hill from my boat to eat and drink whatever the fuck the local petrol station had to offer me, I called up every single coworker, friend, and neighbour who might be able to help me meet this stupid challenge.

A crew of legends appeared, and despite not having any keys to the field gate we just ripped that thing out of the ground and threw it aside. I used my Christmas leatherman to cut the nasty old wire keeping them all in place, and we politely fly tipped all that nonsense off the land to rapidly let everyone know the land was now of "vacant possession."

I took everyone to the pub for a well earned pint, whilst we waited for news from the solicitors and rapidly went more insane.

Tuesday 19th, January 2026

WE GOT THE LAND

AGGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHHGHHHHHHHHHH.

I am going to have so much more to say about all this. But it turns out that if you give a fuck about something a lot. You try and try and try and try. You build a community of people who all care about the same thing. You fight together to make it happen. YOU CAN DO IT.

We have all been out in the field clearing barbed wire, removing scrap metal, opening trails, and living our best life since this has been done. Julian has built a landing page to find out more about our efforts and theirs a mailing list so you can hear specifically all about what we're up to there, but THANK FUCK this two years of hell trying to buy it is over.

Warleigh Nature Reserve

Warleigh Nature Reserve is 81 acres of land directly on the River Avon near Bath

Warleigh Nature Reserve

This is the largest rewilding project in all of Bath that's not owned by Sir Brian Harold May, but we aren’t all sitting on that lead guitarist for Queen money. 🤣

To leave you with a funny callback. It really has been two years, which is such a long time ago I was still actively posting on Twitter. I had no idea how I was going to get this land then. I was emailing Giles off of Buffy because he lives in Bath. You can go from no clue to having it done if you just kick every single door down.