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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 keep coming back to this: people are looking for something genuine. They might call it good work, a useful tool, a decent conversation, a song that gets under the ribs, a place where they can take their guard down for five minutes. The label changes. The hunger doesn’t You can feel the difference when somebody has tried to make contact rather than merely perform. There’s a person in the thing. A bit of risk. A lived question. Maybe a rough edge left in because polishing it away would have taken the life out of it. Genuine does not mean

July 13, 2026 No Comments

Thinking with my feet I have started calling them Wisdom Walks, which sounds a little grand for what usually begins with me putting on my shoes and trying to get out of the house before I disappear too far into the screen. But the name has earned its keep. I go walking when something in me has become stuck: a question about work, a snag in a piece of writing, a feeling I have been carrying round without properly looking at it. I don’t go out with a plan to solve it. I take it with me and see what

July 12, 2026 No Comments

This morning I had one of those spells where there were so many possible things to do that I couldn’t bring myself to choose any of them. Nothing dramatic. Just the little wheel-spin of a mind faced with too many open tabs and too many worthy directions. Then I decided to walk into town for sausages and hot dog buns. That gave the day a shape. There’s fresh sunshine in Southam to enjoy. I’ll light the barbecue this afternoon, cook a few sausages, and sit outside for a while in the shade and drink a few IPAs my daughter dropped

July 11, 2026 No Comments

I don’t usually weigh in on political matters, but as an independent creator, discovery is already hard enough. Now the UK government is putting its thumbs down on the scale. YouTube & TikTok Compelled To Boost BBC & ITV Content Under UK Government Plans The government’s argument is basically that the media landscape has changed, and public-service broadcasters are getting buried inside algorithmic platforms. People increasingly get news and culture through YouTube, TikTok, etc., so the UK wants trusted public service content (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5) to remain visible rather than disappear behind whatever the recommendation engines reward. I

July 10, 2026 No Comments

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It’s constantly trying to connect dots, predict what happens next, and turn scattered information into a coherent shape. When everything is already explained, the pattern is complete. The brain can relax or get bored. But when there is uncertainty like a missing piece, an unanswered question, a strange detail, or an unfinished story, the brain becomes more alert. It “leans forward” psychologically, searching for the pattern that will resolve the tension. The uncertainty creates an open loop. We want closure, so we keep reading, watching, listening, or exploring. In writing, this means you don’t

July 10, 2026 No Comments

Everything becomes source material. I have been reading an old mythogeography interview with Phil Smith. The thread has me thinking about walking, place, story, performance, and the odd things that gather around a route once I stop treating it as just a way of getting somewhere. On my own much smaller patch of ground, that might mean the walk to the gym with my Plaud running, capturing the ordinary moments of people beginning their day. Or it might be a half-formed thought about the old industrial clock that The Man uses to keep us marching in step. Or maybe it’s

July 10, 2026 No Comments

There is a particular comedy in being your own publisher, your own platform, your own little one-person media empire. The upside is freedom. The downside is that when the site falls over, there is no calm tech team in matching hoodies quietly restoring the kingdom while you sip coffee and think writerly thoughts. It’s just you. You and the critical error message. Which is how I found myself this morning laughing at the strange bargain I’ve made with the open web. I left Substack last year because I didn’t want to build my house inside someone else’s walled garden. I

July 9, 2026 No Comments

I’m sure one of the worst nightmares for any parent is your child going missing. I was out on my morning Wisdom Walk today and noticed an unusual number of people in the fields where I usually walk. There are often dog walkers about, but this felt different. At one point, I saw a woman looking into an old cowshed. I thought maybe she was a photographer trying to catch the shed in the morning light. But then she came toward me and explained that she was searching for a young girl who had gone missing. No one had seen

July 8, 2026 No Comments

A walk is never just a walk. The ground beneath our feet is layered with stories. Streets carry memories. Landscapes hold arguments. A statue, a sign, a fence, an empty building – each one quietly tells us something about power, belonging, and how we are allowed to move through the world. Smith’s radical walker becomes part explorer, part artist, part troublemaker. Someone who looks for the cracks. Someone who questions the map they have been handed. But what I enjoyed about Wilson’s reflection is that he doesn’t simply follow the trail. He pushes back. He questions the radical angle: Must

July 6, 2026 No Comments

I keep thinking about the idea of writing an ebook that doesn’t perpetuate the expectation that a book needs to be read in a straight line. I know this isn’t a new idea; that’s what the hypertext movement was all about. But the idea of doing this resurfaced for me again this morning while reading Phil Smith’s book on mythogeography. He has embedded hyperlinks in the ebook that encourage you to go off on tangents. I like the idea of a reader following whatever catches their attention and being able to move through the text by curiosity rather than obedience.

July 6, 2026 No Comments

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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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