All posts

Nobody lets the moment land

The moment passes quicker than the work that got you there.

3 min read

Graphic design in the style of a 1950s–60s American film poster by Saul Bass. A large warm teal circle, almost complete, with a small gap at the top — like a finish line that immediately becomes a starting line. The circle sits off-centre, leaning left, bleeding off the left edge. At the gap: a B&W photographic cutout of a single safety pin, open, placed at the break as if the circle is held there temporarily.

Tuesday night. Three browser tabs open. A redirect CSV that still isn’t quite right. A pre-launch checklist that’s somehow getting longer.

It’s late. The LSTM website goes live in the morning after a year of work. CMS migration. Copy written and rewritten. Accessibility audits. Metadata mapped across hundreds of pages. Tracking rebuilt from the ground up. UX reviews. Stakeholder sign-offs. Timelines that kept revealing new timelines underneath them. Staring at things until they stopped looking like words.

Then my phone goes.

WhatsApp. The football group.

Mo Salah leaving Liverpool at the end of the season. Nine years. That’s it.

Forty seconds, maybe less, between “what a legend” and “what comes next”. Nine years. 255 goals. 435 appearances. Two Premier Leagues. A Champions League. Four Golden Boots. The Club World Cup. And the conversation had already moved on before I’d even put my phone down.

I went back to the redirect CSV. The website still had to launch in the morning.

I’ve been thinking about that forty-second window all day, because the same thing happened with the website.

We went live this morning. It looks good. Tracking’s where it should be. Redirects are largely clean. After a year of work, it is actually, genuinely live. Real URL. Real users.

And I have a bugs list.

I had the bugs list before we launched. That’s the thing. When you’ve been inside something for that long, you don’t get to experience the finished version as finished. You experience it as a list of known issues you’re now managing in public.

The launch isn’t the end. It’s just the point where the work stops being invisible.

So instead of sitting with it, you move.

What struck me about Salah’s announcement wasn’t the departure. It was the timing. He posted while his contract still had a year to run. Liverpool’s statement said the real celebration would come later, at the end of the season, when there is space to do it properly. Even they parked the moment. Put it in the diary for May.

I wonder if the people actually inside these things ever get to feel the ending the way everyone else does. Klopp’s teams were incredible to watch. From the outside, it was pure euphoria. But Klopp always seemed to be processing something else as well. Joy, yes. But also, what needs fixing for Saturday?

That’s the version of endings you get when you’ve been properly in something. Not the clean, external version. The internal one, where every achievement comes bundled with what it cost and what still isn’t done.

I’d like to say today felt like a proper moment. A pause. A breath. Something earned.

It didn’t, really.

The work isn’t going anywhere. There’s more to build, more to fix, more to learn.

But some things deserve a moment, even if you have to make the space for it yourself.

So I’ll watch a Mo Salah compilation on YouTube and take one.

The website will still be there in the morning.