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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

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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

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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

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July 1, 2026 No Comments

At Orwell’s Grave, Still Asking Who Watches

Today I went to the , 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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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June 18, 2026 No Comments

NOTES

I fell into this through a glossary. Plaque tournante. The words unsettled me even before I understood what they truly meant. The turning place. Not just some junction where paths cross, but a point where the weight of a single decision bends the rails of your life onto a new course. Like the time I parked my car before formation and a military policeman stopped me for speeding when I wasn’t speeding. It isn’t a crossroads, not really. Crossroads imply options laid out before you, inviting you to pick them. This is different. This is the moment when the path

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July 5, 2026 No Comments

I like sharing a campsite with chickens and goats and sheep. It’s barebones in the best possibble way. Some of these places can be over produced like they’re trying to create a luxury experience in a field. This place, Grange Farm, is the opposite. It’s just grass, canvas, animals, weather and the small practical ritual of keeping yourself fed, dry, and reasonably human. Although, three days without a shower and I’m starting to feel ferel. On the first of July I started a 31-day weblogging challenge. I wanted to blog in the original sense of the word: not posts designed

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July 4, 2026 No Comments

There’s something beautifully ridiculous about camping and caravaning. Looking out across this fieldand I’m thinking at that here we are, modern humans with houses, central heating and air conditioning, broadband, sofas, fitted kitchens, proper beds, cupboards full of things – and for pleasure we hitch a small white box to the back of a car and go sit in a field under a grey sky. And yet somehow it works. Maybe the secret to the absurdity is that we’re not really leaving comfort because we hate comfort. We’re leaving it because too much comfort can become stale and invisible. The

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July 3, 2026 2 Comments

I’m sunning myself like a shameless lizard on a warm rock. Our camp is set up. I’ve cracked open the first Punk IPA of our extended weekend. Aerosmith’s Amazing is playing in the background, blending in with the goats. A couple of chickens came by earlier to greet us. My first chicken welcoming committee. They seemed eager to tell us all about their farm. I have no plans this evening beyond the plans I’m executing right now, which is nothing. And nothing is good. In fact, nothing remarkable has happened today. And yet it feels quietly significant. Perhaps that’s one

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July 2, 2026 No Comments

We’re headed up north for a few days of camping near the River Wyre. We chose the spot because it’s near Blackpool and the Lytham Festival is on, and we scored some free tickets to see the Petshop Boys and the Scissor Sisters on Saturday night. Blackpool is a good distance from us, so we decided to make it a four-day weekend. We’ve been to Blackpool once before. It’s a seaside town that has seen better days. This trip, we’ll spend more time in the smaller coastal towns and do more hiking.

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July 2, 2026 No Comments

Went to look at a caravan this evening. It was older than it looked in the photos. The couple selling it lived on a farm. They said they had never actually camped in it. They had been using it as a spare room for their son while they renovated his bedroom. If I were more of a handyman, I might have taken it on as a fixer-upper. But they had removed the whole front seating area, and they hadn’t tested the water or the gas, so it was a no from me. We’re looking for something around 2004, four-berth, with

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July 1, 2026 No Comments

This is what I imagined the old hypertext dream would be like before it got usurped by feeds, timelines, dashboards, and engagement funnels. What I find beautiful about the Universal Turing Machine memoir project is the form matches the nature of memory. The calendar suggests that we pass through time in a straight line. However, we don’t experience time in a straight line. At any given moment, your mind is in the past, the future, or, if you are disciplined enough, it resides in the present moment (in my experience, the mind only ever seems to be in the present for

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July 1, 2026 No Comments

i love a good collage, and a poem to boot. this piece from laura holly charman feels like a anti-self-hlep manifesto. instead of asking for the usual trope of certainty, happiness, or success, she’s asking to be disassembled and put back together in a way that only discomfort can do.

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July 1, 2026 No Comments

There’s a useful little door in Peter Carroll’s chaos magic that doesn’t require you to become a magician, buy the robes, or swallow the whole metaphysical pill. The door is this question: What happens if I believe this — for a while? That shift changes the whole game. Belief stops being a fortress that you settle in and becomes a tool. Or maybe even a costume. Something you can put on, walk around in, test against the world, and then take it off again before you start mistaking it for your skin. This is the part of chaos magic that

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June 29, 2026 No Comments

One of the traps in collaborative leadership is thinking that collaboration begins when we put people in the same room. It doesn’t. A room full of people can still be a room full of separate silos. Everyone arrives carrying their own institutional habits, loyalties, scars, private pressures, and little rulebooks about how things are supposed to work. In health and care systems, this becomes even more tangled because the work is already complex, the stakes are high, and the organisations involved often have different histories, incentives, and ideas of what “good” looks like. This King’s Fund report uses the language

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June 29, 2026 No Comments

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