Hello, first post from me for a while. It’s self-indulgent, but it’s short.

I only have 45 minutes to write this, and it’s important (to me, anyway) that I publish it before the fire dies and the clock ticks over to tomorrow morning.

It’s seven years ago to the day that I left corporate life and set up the lang cat (let’s be clear: I didn’t have a lot of choice). I remember finishing my last day doing some sort of corporate HR report type thing that no-one would ever read, and not getting out the office till nearly 7pm because whatever trash was going to get talked about me once I was away (this always happens), it wasn’t going to be that I skived out before finishing what I had to finish.

Then I left my pass and my BlackBerry and my laptop on my boss’s desk, stepped out through the twirly doors, and life changed forever.

The last seven years has been an astonishing ride. It’s been full of remarkable people, highs, lows, late nights, insane pressure, deadlines, wins, losses, frustrations, those moments where things just flow and just work, those moments where you are truly just eating it, heatmaps, cats, guides, things I’m incredibly proud of, things I’m incredibly not proud of and all the rest of it.

Where we’ve got to is a wee company full of insanely talented people (which a friend of ours dubbed The Devil’s Rejects recently) who want to make a difference in this industry we call home. I would take a Pepsi challenge with any firm ten times, a hundred times our size in terms of the quality of the work we put out there, whether it’s consulting, comms, PR or whatever. And I’d win. We f***ing rock. And we do it while incorporating pictures of aggressive cross-dressing cyborg cats in serious work.

I’m told that the seven-year-itch cliche is a real thing for business owners who last this long; folk start to make big changes for the sake of it, maybe in search for the buzz they got at the start. I dunno. I still get the buzz. I get it whenever we put out a good piece of work, or win a new client, or move a debate on, or even make someone laugh on Twitter. It’s all good to me.

So as I listen to the fire settle, and cast my mind back across all the adventures of the last seven years, from the twirly doors to the Gimp Cave to the Ghost of Catchpell to the lang cat’s current airy home, I’m looking for that itch. I don’t feel it. I do feel pride in all the felines, past and present, and in what we’ve done and what we do. I do feel ready to keep it rocking and rolling for the next seven years. And I do feel enormous gratitude to everyone – colleagues, clients, friends, critics, the lot – who have played a part.

Thanks to you all. Seven not out. No itch (apart from The Condition, but we don’t talk about that). Let’s do it again.