working notes

Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground 

July 14, 2026 5:50 am

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 is.

My best name for it, today, is receptive thinking. It is not the same as switching your brain off. It is not believing everything you feel, or treating a hunch as a court ruling. It is the capacity to sit with something before you pull it apart. To listen before you judge. To notice tone, context, relationship, body language, the strange image that arrives while you are making coffee, and the fact that an idea may still be half-grown.

Critical thought asks: is this true? Receptive thought asks: what is this showing me?

One works by distinction. The other works by attunement. One tests the map. The other notices what the map has left out: the texture of the ground, the person standing beside you, the nagging feeling that the question itself has been framed too narrowly.

I recognise the Yang reflex in myself. It wants to get hold of a thought quickly, put it through its paces, and decide whether it deserves to stay. Useful reflex. It has saved many of us from bad arguments, dodgy gurus, and the kind of certainty that falls apart the moment you ask it a second question.

Yet an overworked critical faculty can become a little border guard behind the eyes. Every new thought has to produce a passport before it can enter. Some ideas need questioning; some need a little room. A walk. A notebook. A few days of being carried around in the body before language catches up.

The opposite trap is real too. Receptivity without discernment can turn into absorption, where every feeling becomes a fact and every coincidence becomes an instruction. That road can get very strange, very quickly.

So I am not looking for a winner. I am looking for a rhythm. Receive the signal. Let it form. Then test it. Put it into words. See what remains when it meets other people, actual life, and the awkward furniture of reality.

Maybe thinking well is less like holding court and more like a good conversation between two old friends. One says, “Hang on, does that really stand up?” The other says, “Yes, but have you properly listened yet?”

July 13, 2026 1:04 pm
An Olympus Tough compact camera held over dry grass

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

deríve app

I don’t know what I’m looking for yet. That’s part of the point. A camera like this feels less like equipment and more like permission to wander with my eyes open.

Sometimes the old tools don’t need replacing. They need a walk.

July 13, 2026 12:41 pm

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, the questions you keep returning to, and whether there’s a real person behind the thing.

A useful offer can still sit at the end of that visit. It might be a course, a workshop, a book, a paid community, a print, a small tool, or a way to go deeper. But it works best as something a person takes home from territory they have already spent time in. A souvenir, if you like, but one with a job to do.

This is not an argument against making money from the work. It’s an argument for letting the work have a life before asking it to become a funnel. Build rooms. Leave doors open. Let people see the practice in motion.

The same thing applies to AI. The tools now let one person make far more than they could make alone: pages, drafts, videos, apps, images, research trails, even small strange artefacts. That doesn’t make the human unnecessary. It makes taste, attention, and editorial judgment more valuable. Somebody still has to decide what is worth making, what belongs together, what sounds true, and what can go in the bin.

I’m trying to think of the solo practice less as a personal brand and more as a small studio. The writer, researcher, editor, designer, and technician may now have some machine help. Fine. Somebody still has to walk the road, notice the bird on the fence, have the thought, and decide why it matters.

Make the museum. The gift shop will have something worth selling.

July 13, 2026 8:05 am

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 perfect, pure, or terribly serious. It means the thing comes from somewhere real. It has fingerprints on it. It gives you a reason to believe there might still be somebody on the other side of the screen.

July 12, 2026 9:58 pm

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 happens once it has to travel alongside the rest of life.

There’s a difference between sitting at a desk and trying to think your way through a problem and walking with it for an hour. At the desk, I can become a small committee meeting in my own head. I revisit the same argument, polish the same worry, and call it inquiry. On the road, the question has to make room for traffic, dogs, the weight of my rucksack, somebody mowing a lawn, and the stiffness in my legs on a hill. The world keeps interrupting. I think that is part of the point.

Walking puts a question back into proportion. It gets it out of the little sealed room behind my eyes. It does not make the question disappear, but it lets me come alongside it rather than stare at it from six inches away.

Some of my favourite philosophers were keen walkers. Thoreau made walking a way of refusing the narrowness of town life and other people’s expectations. Rousseau used his walks for memory, solitude, and self-examination. Nietzsche claimed that all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. I do not need to borrow their coats to see the truth in it. A thought changes when the body has to carry it.

That is the bit I keep coming back to. I think better on the move because movement is not just the backdrop to the thinking. It is part of the apparatus. The rhythm of the feet, the changing ground, the simple fact of having somewhere to go: all of it gives the mind another way to work. Ideas arrive sideways. An old memory turns up because I pass a particular street. A sentence I could not finish at the desk finds its last few words when I am crossing the road.

Not every walk gives me a revelation. Some walks leave me with tired feet and less static in my head. That is enough. I do not want to turn walking into another self-improvement project with targets and outcomes. Sometimes the walk is simply a way of letting the mind compost. Sometimes it gives me a line for the notebook. Sometimes it shows me that I have been asking the wrong question.

For me, a Wisdom Walk is self-inquiry with the doors open. I take a question out into the world, let the road and the body have their say, and wait to see if a truer sentence catches up with me.

July 11, 2026 11:27 am

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 off this morning and that are now chilling in the fridge. I think that’s a good enough recovery plan. No grand strategy. Just food, a walk, some sun, and lounging in the back garden.

I forget this sometimes. The answer to a head full of choices isn’t always another choice. Sometimes it’s a pack on my back, a familiar route into town, and something simple to prepare when you get back.

The work can wait until my mind clears. For now, the sausages will do.

July 10, 2026 4:24 pm

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 get it; however, because attention is a scarce resource online, a recommendation slot isn’t neutral. If an algorithm boosts one thing, something else moves down. And I’m already so far down the list that something like this will essentially make me invisible.

For a solo YouTuber, podcaster, blogger, or filmmaker, the modern bargain has always been this: you don’t have a broadcaster’s budget, but at least you can compete in the same feed. A bedroom creator can occasionally outrank a corporation because the audience decides. That possibility is part of what made the creator economy exciting.

The question becomes: what is YouTube?

If it’s like old television infrastructure, then the government sees “prominence rules” as similar to making BBC One easy to find on your TV guide.

If it’s a creative commons/marketplace of individual voices, then forcing prominence feels more like giving established institutions premium shelf space in a shop where everyone else has to fight for the back shelves.

There’s another layer too: institutions like the BBC already have advantages:

  • brand recognition
  • archives
  • production budgets
  • journalists
  • marketing teams
  • existing audiences

Meanwhile, an independent creator is trying to win attention one post at a time.

The tricky bit is that both fears can be true: misinformation is a real concern, and concentrating visibility around legacy institutions can make the web feel less open.

It actually connects to a lot of the early weblogging ethos: the internet was exciting because a person with a weird little website could sit beside CNN, BBC, or The Guardian in the same browser window. Authority came partly from links, reputation, community, and usefulness — not just institutional status.

The philosophical question hiding underneath this story is: should the internet optimise for trusted institutions or for discovery from the edges?

The early web crowd would probably say: the interesting stuff usually comes from the edges. 😉

In reply to https://deadline.com/2026/06/youtube-promote-bbc-content-uk-government-proposals-1236963834/ by Jake Kanter.

July 10, 2026 3:54 pm

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 always need to explain everything immediately. Sometimes the most compelling sentence is the one that creates a gap in the reader’s understanding:

I had walked down that street hundreds of times. This was the first time I noticed the door.

Now the reader’s brain starts working: What door? Why hadn’t he seen it? What is behind it?

July 10, 2026 2:51 pm

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 a line lifted from a book I’m reading over coffee.

None of it needs to arrive as an insight.

That’s what I mean when I say everything becomes source material. Left alone, that phrase can sound like a content marketer’s battle cry if you leave it there. I mean something quieter than that. The world keeps handing over fragments. My job is to notice them, carry them for a while, remix them with whatever else is already moving through me, then put them back into the stream.

The page is another stretch of the path. The walk ends, but the thread carries on through a link, a voice memo, or a sentence that caught on something and refused to let go.

Sometimes the whole practice is just this: notice what caught you, follow it for a few steps, and leave the door open.

July 9, 2026 9:44 am

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 wanted sovereignty. My own domain. My own server. My own little patch of digital ground.

And then, naturally, my patch of digital ground went face down in the mud.

The irony arrived by way of an app called Kerouac, which, with a name like that, was always going to get my attention. It bills itself as a studio for pro bloggers, pulling together posts, drafts, ideas, pipelines, feeds, and whatever other fragments of a writing life are scattered across the web.

I signed up for the free trial. No credit card. Low commitment. Maximum curiosity.

My first impression: too much structure. Too many panes. A little too much productivity inducing anxiety for my taste. But it also has a discovery feed, and that led me to JA Westenberg, whose work I’ve followed and liked for a while.

From there I ended up back in the Substack flow, reading her notes, posts, linked videos, and newsletters all stitched together in one clean stream. I had to admit, grudgingly, that it worked. There was cohesion. A centre of gravity. A single place where the work gathered and pointed outward.

And then I clicked over to my own site to ponder its cohesion.

Critical error.

Beautiful timing, really.

There I was, admiring the elegant flow of a platform I had left because I didn’t want to be owned by it, only to be reminded that independence comes with maintenance costs. If you want the freedom of the road, you also have to know what to do when the van breaks down.

This is the bit we don’t always talk about in the romance of the indie web. Owning your platform is noble. It is also admin. It is backups, updates, plugins, hosting, monitoring, and occasionally staring at a broken homepage while wondering if “pro blogger” is too generous a category for a man whose blog is currently unconscious.

Still, I don’t think this is an argument against owning your work.

It is just a reminder that ownership is not an aesthetic. It is a practice.

You don’t get to claim the open road and then complain there’s no concierge.

The other timely thing was Westenberg’s post about the humble Moleskine notebook. I’ve been having my own notebook renaissance lately, using paper again as a visual thinking tool. Less dashboard, more scratchpad. Less system, more contact.

Maybe that is the shape I’m after online too.

Not more platforms. Not more clever pipes.

A notebook with a door.

A place where the thinking can happen in public, where the fragments can gather, where the trail is visible, and where, yes, I occasionally have to crawl under the bonnet myself.

That might be the real bargain of the indie web:

freedom, but with spanners.

Update:

I wrote the above earlier this morning. I have since connected my blog to the app. And I must say, I really like the insights page.

July 8, 2026 9:47 am


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 or heard from her since about 5 PM yesterday. According to her cousin, who posted the callout to the community on our local news group on Facebook, the girl has no mobile phone or money.

Suddenly, I felt the dread that all those people out searching must have been carrying.

I checked the Facebook group to get more details and to see what the girl looked like so I could keep an eye out for her as I completed my circuit around the fields.

If you felt that same dread as I was telling this story, you can relax now too. The young girl has been found. There are no details yet, but it appears she is unharmed..

July 6, 2026 4:46 pm

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 every walk become an act of resistance?
Must every footstep carry a manifesto?

Maybe walking’s magic is that it refuses to stay in one lane. It can challenge, bear witness, or be a source of wonder. Likewise, the walker can hack the city, listen to the forest, or simply drift.

And perhaps the cyberflâneur does the same thing in another landscape — following hyperlinks instead of footpaths, wandering through forgotten corners of the web, looking for traces left behind.

Each path changes the walker.
Each walker changes the path.

In reply to 51. Phil Smith, Walking’s New Movement: Opportunities, Decelerations and Beautiful Obstacles in the Performances, Politics, Philosophies and Spaces of Contemporary Radical Walking – Reading and Walking.

July 6, 2026 6:36 am

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.

This interests me because I think many people buy books and never finish them. Maybe part of the problem is the old expectation that a book must be read from cover to cover. We inherit that model from school, from print culture, and from the physical shape of the book itself. But not every book needs to work that way.

Fiction often depends on sequence, especially when it follows a classical story arc. But essays, field notes, philosophical fragments, personal reflections, guides, and idea-books might be better served by a looser structure. A hyperlinked ebook could invite the reader to wander, return, skip, loop, and discover.

The point wouldn’t be to make the book easier in a shallow sense. It would be to make the book more alive to the way people actually read now: dipping in, following associations, chasing questions, and making their own route through the material.

A book like this wouldn’t simply contain links. It would be written as a linked experience. The hyperlinks would become part of the architecture of the text. They would let the reader participate in the journey rather than just consume the sequence chosen by the author.

Maybe the ebook is closer to a living map than just an electronic copy of a physical book.

July 5, 2026 8:19 pm

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 beneath your feet shifts almost imperceptibly. Your weight shifts from something unseen, and suddenly the way forward isn’t just another choice. It’s the only choice that remains. You stand there alone because some choices can’t be shared. They’re too raw, too precise, like a key turning in a lock that no one else can see. The people who love you might walk beside you right up to the edge of that place, but when the time comes, they can’t step over the threshold with you. And that’s the thing about a plaque tournante, it doesn’t just turn the path. It turns you. And no one else can do the turning but you.

July 4, 2026 12:14 pm

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 around hooks and calls to action, but entries. Entries as field notes, half-formed thoughts, fragments, or full on essays if that’s the way text goes.

Last night I wanted to read something close to the way I’m trying to write. Something observational. Embodied. Simple in time and space. Definitely less theory and more of what is around me.

I was reading Tarot of Self-Discovery, but it was getting heavy with archetypal psychology, and out here I didn’t want more interior landscape. I wanted solid ground.

So I scrolled through the Kindle and found, somehow, a book I don’t remember buying: Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways. From the title, it sounds like just the thing I’m trying to avoid. But then the subtitle kicks in with this: “compiled from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectus, records, and everyday utopias of the pedestrian resistance.”

That felt close to what I wanted.

Especially pedestrian resistance. That sounds intriguing.

July 3, 2026 6:10 pm

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 house becomes so much background noise. And we lose ourselves in the routine of living.

So we drag a miniature home into a patch of grass and make life awkward enough to notice it again.

You become aware of the wind direction, the damp grass, the neighbours you’ll probably never speak to beyond a nod, the small choreography of plugging in, levelling up, putting the steps out, and finding where the toilets are.

It is absurd. But it’s ritual absurdity.

In essence, we’ve setup a temporary village made of caravans, cables, folding tables, dogs, children, gas bottles, mugs of tea, and people pretending not to watch each other reverse badly into pitches. For a weekend, everyone agrees to live slightly closer to the elements and slightly closer to one another.

Maybe the caravan is a compromise between the cave and the house.

Not quite wild. Not quite domestic.

And maybe that’s why we love it because it loosens the spell of ordinary life just enough for us to feel ourselves living it.

July 2, 2026 5:40 pm
Two inquisitive chickens in the grass at camp

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 of camping’s hidden gifts. It lowers the threshold for what counts as enough. A patch of grass. A cold beer. A favourite song. And a couple of inquisitive chickens.

July 2, 2026 8:45 am

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.

July 1, 2026 8:28 pm

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 a fixed bed.

July 1, 2026 11:53 am

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 very short bursts of time).

We remember by association, by years that glow, by wounds, by recurring rooms, by people who become portals into the past, and by one summer that suddenly connects to something thirty years later. The Universal Turing Machine seems to understand that. It turns memoir into a navigable field rather than a corridor of time. Worth your time, especially if hypertext holds a special place in your heart.

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