It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. After setting the alarm clock to go off at 7am this morning – affording me an hour to have a wash, get dressed, and…

The blog to end all blogs I stood up about six months ago, before quietly shuttering it in a fit of “why am I doing ANY of this?” has been resurrected, and has essentially become the “source of all things”. At some point yesterday – nearly five days later than planned – and now with…

Escape has become a theme recently. Escape from obligation, escape from expectation… escape from lots of things. It’s a temporary escape, but sometimes needed. This morning you find me holed up in a corner of Wetherspoons – escaping from the world for an hour. I’ve just made a “small American breakfast” disappear, and am about…

Maybe I’ll take a step sideways, sit down, and actually try to read some blogs tomorrow, rather than relentlessly charge towards the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. I need to SLOW THE HELL DOWN. After a dinner-table conversation last weekend, somehow I agreed to escort my eldest daughter to a nearby…

And so here we are. We survived a day in the city together. London is always exciting to arrive in – as is any big city, I imagine – but it’s also nice to leave it behind too. After escaping the house a little after 9am this morning, we made our way to the local…

After watching the inexorable march of Substack towards the same commercially driven hellscape as countless platforms before it, I’ve been scouting around for alternatives. Once I started looking, I quickly discovered a quiet exodus of similarly minded writers going on right under my nose. A small army of similarly fed up writers in search of…

What the hell happened to being genuine, thoughtful, honest, or empathetic? In the midst of feeling pretty depleted last night, a wonderful friend reminded me that I have nine days to make my own stretched out in front of me. Nine days to recharge. Except of course the nine days are already being taken from…

While brushing my teeth a few days ago, it occurred to me that I haven’t been sick for quite some time. Months. Not since this time last year, when I ended up at the doctors for perhaps the third time in twenty five years, and ended up being prescribed alarming quantities of steroids. Somebody, somewhere…

While taking a break from work this morning, I wandered into the kitchen and decided that the clothes rack had been standing in everybody’s way for quite long enough. While folding the clothes from the rack onto the dining room table, and putting various other things away (my daughters are experts at getting things out),…

A few days ago while walking home from town the cogs at the back of my brain started turning. I’m not entirely sure why they started turning, but they did, and I wrote down what was turning over and over, which was lucky really, because moments later the universe landed a size twenty eight foot…