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The walk is the encounter

I walked to the gym this morning. That sounds too ordinary to announce, which is probably why it matters. The gym is only seven minutes away by car. My normal routine is to get in, drive there, work out, drive back, eat something, shower, and be behind the desk by nine like a good citizen of the industrial clock. That’s the sensible move. The 9-to-5 clock still lives in me. I can feel it. Even now, self-employed, answering to no manager hovering over my shoulder, I can still feel the old tribunal warming itself up somewhere behind my eyes. By

July 6, 2026 No Comments

Know thyself sounds a little too noble

I woke up this morning in my tent thinking about self-validation. That’s the barefoot philosopher taking advantage of a little solitude before the day starts. If the ego is partly a protection system, can it ever be trusted to validate the self it is trying to protect? “Know thyself” sounds noble until we remember that the self doing the knowing is also the self editing the footage, hiding the evidence, managing the courtroom, and sometimes bribing the judge. So yes, self-validation is possible, but probably not as a solitary act of pure inner certainty. It’s more like a triangulation. Self-validation

July 3, 2026 1 Comment

In the street, I leave footprints. On the web, I leave links.

I’ve been using the Plaud NotePin for a while now. I wear it around my neck like a lanyard. It’s a pretty stylish-looking device, so it doesn’t tend to draw attention to itself. I wear it on my wisdom walks. It’s an easy way for me to walk and capture my notes hands-free. And because it has a 20-hour battery life, I can just record and forget about it. I probably look like a bit of a madman walking and talking to myself. But that’s OK. And then when I get home, Plaud converts into an MP3, and I upload

July 1, 2026 No Comments

At Orwell’s Grave, Still Asking Who Watches

Today I went to the #1984Symposium, held beside George Orwell’s grave on what would have been his birthday. Orwell, of course, was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903. George Orwell was the name he wrote under, the name that now floats above him like a warning label attached to the twentieth century. But at the grave, it felt less like visiting “George Orwell the icon” and more like standing beside the resting place of a man whose questions are still walking around without him. The gathering itself was wonderfully un-grand. No stage. No branding. No big institutional apparatus.

June 25, 2026 No Comments

Welcome to the Textual Underground

What appears here as a blog post usually began somewhere less presentable. A sentence in a daily note. A line spoken into a recorder while walking. A paragraph abandoned three years ago. A highlight from a book I wasn’t expecting to matter. A half-formed thought dropped into Obsidian before it could evaporate. A conversation with Milton, or Claude, or Copilot, where something in the archive started tugging at my sleeve. By the time a piece reaches the blog, it’s already got a little history. This is easy to forget, because blogs make writing look cleaner than it is. A post

June 24, 2026 No Comments

Working Notes: Gonzo Spirituality and the Bar of the Psyche

This old post has wandered back into consciousness: Holy Gonzo! Embracing Chaos and Truth on the Path to Self-Discovery. I reposted on social media over the weekend. I wrote it back in October 2024, but reading it now, I’m feeling drawn to explore the subject further. The phrase at the centre of it all is Gonzo Spirituality. At the time, I was trying to name a kind of spiritual practice that didn’t require me to step away from the life I was actually living. I wasn’t drawn to the serene, white-robed, mountain-retreat version of spirituality. I didn’t want a path

June 23, 2026 No Comments

Better Than Sex, 30 Years Later: Revisiting the Book That Broke My Brain

07:39. I’m in my lounge chair drinking black coffee, the morning still soft around the edges. For my morning read today, I’ve been revisiting Hunter S. Thompson, starting with the book that began my literary love affair with his work: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie. There’s something about Hunter that still gets under my skin in the best possible way. He doesn’t simply report the story. He enters it. He becomes part of the event he’s describing. He’s not pretending to stand outside the madness with clean hands and a neutral expression. He is in the room,

June 20, 2026 No Comments

Being, not becoming

Saturday. Kessingland. A camping field on a sea cliff; the morning is already bright by the time I properly arrive in it. I wanted to watch the sunrise. That was the plan in the loose way plans form when you sleep outdoors and imagine yourself becoming more elemental by morning. But the field gave me sleep instead, and the sun did its work without me standing there to witness it. There’s something almost comic in that. I had come to the edge of the country with the vague heroic notion of rising with the light, looking out across the water

June 18, 2026 No Comments

NOTES

I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I’ll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear “I have the power!” and the storyteller who’s curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more than a marketing reboot. One thing I hope they preserve is what made the original strangely compelling beneath the Saturday morning animation: it wasn’t just muscles and monsters. It was a mythic story of identity. Adam isn’t powerful because he’s He-Man; he’s powerful because he chooses to become He-Man. That’s

July 25, 2026 No Comments

This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared: Is this your game? Is this your true mission? I could almost locate the voice physically. I raised my left hand as though it were speaking from that side of my brain. It wasn’t dismissing the book. Intellectually, I find the whole thing fascinating: the idea of following the sense of “I” backwards, beyond name, history, personality

July 24, 2026 No Comments

“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine. And yet, some mornings, it’s mostly true. Routine isn’t the villain. I like the small anchors of a day: making coffee before I look at a screen, walking the familiar stretch of road, opening the notebook, sitting down to work before I’ve had time to invent too many reasons not to. A few repeated

July 22, 2026 No Comments

The forest does not offer answers in the way a book, a screen, or a clever conversation does. It gives you texture. Uneven ground. The sound of your own feet. Branches moving against one another. The minor negotiations of a body making its way through the world. In that setting, the mind’s usual bureaucracy begins to lose authority. The lists, rehearsed conversations, inherited measures of success, old complaints, small self-defences: they do not disappear, but they stop being the only voices in the room. To “lose my mind” is not to become irrational. It is to step outside the cramped

July 21, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week. It’s a lovely bit of mischief because it gives the walk a rule without getting to complicated. The line is arbitrary, yet the body has to negotiate it: the cul-de-sac, the dual carriageway, the bit of private land, the pub garden, the place where the tidy circle becomes a long awkward

July 19, 2026 No Comments

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere to stand, then asks whether you might look sideways. This can feel dreamy at first. Then you realise the dreaminess has a method. Solnit slows the reader down long enough for the usual boundaries to become less convincing. Inner life and public life. Geography and

July 18, 2026 No Comments

It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have. You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play the hand we have been dealt. Not to mix metaphors, but I am reminded of Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of life as a game of chess. He was searching for a metaphor for the silent player seated opposite us from the moment we are born: “The chess-board is the world,

July 17, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical thinking and the kind of intelligence that has to sit beside it. Critical thinking gets a lot of the limelight. Fair enough. It is the part of the mind that asks for evidence, spots the loose plank in an argument, and refuses to be charmed by every shiny claim that comes down the road. In a culture thick with sales pitches, outrage machines, and synthetic certainty, we need it. It is the Yang move: active, discriminating, separating what holds up from what does not. But I keep wondering what its Yin counterpart

July 14, 2026 No Comments

Dusting off the old street photography and field note cameras this morning. The first one out of the drawer is my old Olympus Tough: compact, waterproof, shockproof, and made for being carried rather than protected. I’m about to head into Leamington Spa to give the Deríve app I made over the weekend its first proper outing. The plan is simple: follow its prompts, pay attention to where they take me, and let the camera collect a few traces along the way I don’t know what I’m looking for yet. That’s part of the point. A camera like this feels less

July 13, 2026 No Comments

The mistake is to build the gift shop first. A lot of independent people do this. We make the course, the membership, the coaching offer, the template pack, and the shop. Then we stand in the doorway wondering why nobody has come in. It’s the wrong end of the building. The work itself is the museum. The blog, the walk, the field note, the odd little web page, the newsletter, the experiment, the short video made from a day outside: these are the rooms people wander through. They’re where someone gets a feel for how you see, what you notice,

July 13, 2026 1 Comment

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hotel bar sessions

my new favourite podcast. one bartender. three philosophers. serving straight shots of insight directly to your earbuds.

January 4, 2025 No Comments

started reading some of Charles Olson’s work

started reading some of Charles Olson’s work.

December 28, 2024 No Comments

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