MY FEED

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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’m back inside Tarot of Self-Discovery: A Jungian Guide to Tarot for Therapy, Inner Healing, and Personal Growth, and I can feel why the psychological approach to tarot keeps calling me. It gives me a language I trust. Tarot, in this frame, is not about predicting the future or handing my authority over to a deck of cards. It is a way of working with symbol, image, projection, shadow, inner dialogue, and the strange intelligence of the unconscious. The cards give form to things that often move below the level of ordinary speech. That part feels right to me. But

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June 29, 2026 No Comments

I finished reading Rebecca Blood‘s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. The book may be obsolete in its instructions, but not in its philosophy. That often happens with books written before a medium becomes an industry. They describe a culture before it becomes a market. What I found myself responding to wasn’t the “how to blog” advice. It was, why did weblogging exist in the first place? Back in the early 2000s, a weblog wasn’t primarily a content strategy or a personal brand. It was more like an intellectual commonplace book opened to the

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June 28, 2026 No Comments

Decentralised leadership is surprisingly simple: Leadership is not about holding responsibility. It’s about continually distributing it. Jonas Gröner’s essay adds an important nuance, though. Distribution isn’t dumping tasks onto people. It’s creating conditions where others can genuinely grow into responsibility. A distilled version might look like this: Decentralised leadership is… In one sentence A decentralized leader works to become progressively less indispensable while making the community progressively more capable. The idea that struck me most in the piece wasn’t actually decentralisation itself. It was his redefinition of success: A successful group is one where the passing on of knowledge, responsibility,

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June 28, 2026 No Comments

Once upon a time, I was a news junkie. Devouring multiple newspapers and magazines. I wanted to know what was happening in the world. Partly because of my job — I was an infantry officer — and partly because I just liked knowing what was going on in the world. Then something changed. The business model incentives shifted toward engagement instead of accuracy. Headlines became optimised for reaction, not information. The work of explaining the world gave way to keeping us agitated enough to keep on clicking. Journalism’s Logical Fallacy

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June 27, 2026 No Comments

I like this Kurt Vonnegut quote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Who are you pretending to be? That’s an honest question. Approach the answer with brutal honesty and you’ll be surprised by what you discover. And let me tell you, it’s a hard question to answer. Your defensive system will kick in almost immediately with, “I’m not pretending to be anyone; I’m just me. Straight up!” Push a little harder. Oh, why do I ask myself such brutal questions on a Saturday?

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June 27, 2026 No Comments

5am on a Saturday morning. I see this view every day, but today the cloud formation caught my attention. Prospects of a new day.

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June 27, 2026 No Comments

We’re behind enemy lines now. Big tech. Algorithmic feeds. Scrolling culture. Newsletters. Inboxes. Synthetic sludge. If we want the signal to travel, we have to be willing to disrupt the pattern wherever people already are. The Monk still wants everything to be pristine. He remembers the old web, where people came to your site, bookmarked it, subscribed to it by choice, and came back every day to see what new thing you posted. Part of him still believes that if the hearth is warm enough, people will find their way back to it. But the habits have changed. Readers and

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June 26, 2026 1 Comment

going crazy from the heat…i’m on my way down to All Saints Church in Sutton Courtenay for the and to pay homage to Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell. As I make the pilgrimage down to Sutton Courtenay, what I’m holding in my mind is this: Orwell didn’t predict the future. What he did do was give us names to patterns that recur whenever power seeks to dominate perception: Telescreen• Contemporary echo: smartphones, smart devices, CCTV, digital surveillance Newspeak• Contemporary echo: euphemism, jargon, slogan-thinking, language control Doublethink• Contemporary echo: ideological contradiction, tribal cognition Memory hole• Contemporary echo: deleted records,

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June 25, 2026 No Comments

If you want to get a taste of what we gave up when we sold our souls to social media platforms for convenience and “reach,” read Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. There’s no going back, for sure, at least not physically, but maybe philosophically. Mentally and spiritually, you could find your way back. Just saying…

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June 25, 2026 No Comments

You will have the whole spectrum of experience at your fingertips, not as some tidy menu of moods, but as a roaring carnival of sensation, memory, dream, dread, hunger, laughter, grief, lust, silence, and starlight. You will be able to wander from the first spark of desire to the last breath of surrender, from the mud of the body to the outer rings of imagination, from the old gods whispering in the basement to the unborn versions of yourself knocking on the roof. Every door will open. Behind one, childhood.Behind another, apocalypse.Behind another, a jazz band made of ghosts playing

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June 11, 2026 No Comments

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