Thanks to everyone for the advice. I'm very aware that all I'm doing now is building very basic toy programs without any knowledge of how, say, a function that finds anagrams in an array of strings is 'useful' in the scope of a project a professional coder would work on. I've been dancing around Django and maybe it's time to dive in properly.
I find great joy in programming but I'm also grappling with the fact that I work in a well paid tech field (online marketing) and that the market for coders in the UK isn't great, especially for a (maybe) entry level Python coder. Could I conscience taking a £25,000 pay cut to code? Unfortunately I'm not sure I could.