Time for a new portait photo. The one I've been using was taken by Maria Uhlin in 2018 during a visit to GS1 Sweden. It's served me well but that old jacket went to the clothing bank earlier this year and I can't pretend I look the same as I did 8 years ago.

This new one was taken during the GS1 Standards event in April 2026. We engage a professional photographer, David Plas, to photograph all our events and he's excellent. Conferences all look the same. People standing around in smart casual clothes wearing name badges or sitting watching presentations. But David and his colleagues manage to bring it to life. And, as a bonus for staff, they do portrait photos. This was was taken in Brussels, Tuesday 21st April. It's probably my last professional profile photo, but you nevet know...

Just a quick entry here to note that over the Christmas and New Year holiday I have managed to complete the time-consuming and many would say pointless exercise of adding cover images to all the books listed in by book log. This means that for each book I read from January 2006 onwards (at least, the ones I remembered to record) there is an image of the book's cover as well as a record of what I thought. This is almost always the specific edition I read but it hasn't been possible to achieve that for all of the books listed, especially the older ones. With that done, it's easy to maintain. It was going back looking for cover art from previous years that took the time.

Best book I read in 2025? Abigail Dean's The Death of Us.