Relative Sanity

Sometimes you get the gold

2026-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t think back on my early years with a computer anywhere near enough. Sam Henri Gold’s excellent article on the MacBook Neo made me need to do just that.

My mum got me a Commodore VIC-20 from the local Fine Fare supermarket when I was probably five. We were a Tomorrow’s World household and watched Star Trek repeats over dinner. She knew what was up.

Computers were going to eat the world, and her kid was going to be on the right end of the fork.

I spent hours on that machine. Days, weeks, months, and years. It came with a manual on how to program stuff in BASIC. We couldn’t afford a tape drive with it (legend has it that Mum actually bought the Vic-20 at a massive discount as they were clearing stock and nobody was buying them) so we only had a few cartridges with games.

Of course I played games. An asteroids clone, a space invaders clone, and a game of chess that my dad ended up getting into an argument with.

True story: He came down from spending an hour playing the computer at chess absolutely fuming. The thing cheated! He was educated enough to know that computers aren’t sentient, they can’t “cheat”, but there was obviously a bug! It had made an illegal move and, worse, it had subsequently beaten Dad.

This led him down a rabbit hole where he learned (and then taught me, lest I be caught out by a sneaky silicon opponent in future) about an obscure move called en passant, whereby a pawn can take a piece by moving past it diagonally, but only on a few particular squares on the board.

We were learning.

A few years later I got a hand-me-down Sinclair ZX Spectrum with a grand total of 48k of RAM. This thing had a tape drive, it had a joystick interface, and it had a carrier bag full of games. It also had a dodgy powerpack and, as it turned out, a broken audio cable that would disconnect randomly, often in the final ten seconds of a ten minute game load. Fun.

I had graduated to yelling at the computer now, following in my father’s footsteps.

The machine also came with four hefty volumes of INPUT magazine. Holy crap were those some insanely cool magazines. No internet, no disks, code was stored on tape and you crossed your fingers that they would load. The most reliable way to distribute code, to learn, was to buy magazines with actual code listings in them, and type them in.

And pray you hadn’t made a typo in the 1,000 lines you’d just entered.

You’d hit run and… it worked! I recruited whichever of Mum or Dad seemed to have most reserves of patience left to read out line after line of code to me as I typed. I learned to run the code every so often, to verify that what we’d done so far was correct before moving on. I learned what subroutines were, how to pass variables.

Mostly I learned to ensure my code lines were numbered in multiples of ten so that I could add lines between them later if needed.

I discovered that I could create sprites and assign them to letter keys on the keyboard. I could animate them to move across the screen. I made pretend games that drove cars around the screen, racing each other with no controls.

I got my dad to bring home reams of graph paper from his work (why they had graph paper I have no idea, he was a civil servant in the DHSS), but he brought it home by the box. I spent hours, days drawing out images on the graph paper then writing code to set up little 8x8 grids to print to the screen.

I was taking my art and putting it on the television and it was amazing. I was nine. For my tenth birthday I remember getting a card from an aunt that had a BASIC computer program in it. I read it and saw that it was making sounds, could see the rough sequence and “up and down-ness” of the notes, and guessed it was going to play Happy Birthday. I was right.

My parents were both impressed and thought I might be a witch.

The following year they had scrimped and saved and bought me an Atari ST. I was intimidated. This felt like a proper computer. It was certainly the first computer I owned that came in a box that looked new. Or actually a box at all.

This wasn’t something I could program easily. The previous machines presented essentially a REPL as the primary interface: type in lines of BASIC code to make the computer do things. The ST was different. It had a windowing system, a mouse, icons! You launched programs to make it do things, and then quit them to return to the desktop, instead of just pulling the power code when you were done.

It was new. It was exciting. It ran games, for sure (I lost so many months to Buggy Boy and Operation Wolf), but also art packages, music trackers (TCB Tracker for life), samplers, desktop publishing software, vector art creators… so much stuff.

It was my main computer for eight years. Eight years. I upgraded the RAM, and even ended up hacking together a hard drive that just about mostly worked most of the time.

My favourite program, though, was Protext. Looking back, it was “just” a text editor, but it transformed my computer into a place for writing. A place where I could draft my stories and my reports for school. A place where I could put down my thoughts in a way that stripped them back to the purest essence. Devoid of thinking about presentation, there were no fonts to pick from, no text sizes, no headers, nothing. Just me, a screen, my fingers, and my ideas.

No wonder I still use Neovim.

I’d write in Protext, then save the file out and import it to Timeworks for getting ready to print out for handing in to school. I’d add in pictures I’d made, charts I’d compiled, and place the stapled output neatly on a pile alongside everyone else’s handwritten efforts, lousy with Tipp-ex and smudged ink.

I suspect people hated me. But I loved it. I loved being able to use this box of wonders to create. And that desire fed the games I played. I graduated from Buggy Boy and Operation Wolf to Frontier, a game where the story happened as much outside the game as inside it. I was Commander Harwood, rogue smuggler and bounty hunter, occasional arms dealer but also sympathetic to the explorers of the cosmos, happy to ferry them to remote star systems. For a price. Alongside the mechanics of the game (fly to spaceport, pick up jobs and cargo, map a course to the next star system, fly to spaceport, complete jobs, fight off pirates), I kept a diary of Harwood’s thoughts as he travelled the galaxy. What was he doing on those long flights? At one point I had him playing a game of chess with a far off friend, correspondence chess during long haul flights. I’d track the moves on a real board next to the computer, and then on breaks I’d set up the board in Colossus Chess X and get the computer to make the next move.

Harwood was a pretty lousy player, but occasionally he’d get lucky: I’d set the computer skill to -1.

After I finished school and went to university I bought myself a PC, then a Mac, and, well, here I am. As I got access to more and more finance, I found myself able to choose whatever computer best fit what I wanted to do. I was able to experiment with what fit, buying something, trying it out for a year, then exchanging it for something else.

As a kid, I worked with what I had. And frankly, I think I had more fun.

It’s easy to read this as a rose-tinted view of the shift. This stuff used to be fun, now it’s work. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

But I don’t think that’s it at all. Or at least not the interesting part.

Desktop publishing on the ST was slow. Frontier ran at maybe 10 frames a second on a good day with empty space in front of you. Those floppy drives could take minutes to save or load a long essay. Creating graphics “larger” than the display (essential for print work to not look blocky) would make the computer so hot you could hear the plastic case clicking and creaking as it warped. It was objectively horrible, and I was well aware of it at the time.

But I never saw the solution as I need a new machine. I might have read the magazines and wondered what an Atari TT or a Falcon might have been capable of, but they were pipe dreams and the magazines knew it. And really, I never actually wanted a new machine. I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of the box I had in front of me, to see what I could still shake loose from it.

Reading Sam’s article, there I was. A part of me I’d forgotten about. The part of me that didn’t give a shit about the computer’s limitations, as fixed as granite as they were against my meagre budget. But I didn’t care. All I cared about was making it do what I wanted, create the output I could see in my head. And I didn’t care if it was slow, or messy, or risked burning a literal hole in my desk by leaving it running overnight. All I cared about was making the thing do the thing.

And it was glorious.

These days, I often think of computers as tools, but I used to see them as treasure boxes.

Treasure boxes are buried, hidden. They require effort to unearth. Who knows if they’re even there, or if they’ll be empty when you finally haul them up. But you dig anyway.

You dig because digging is fun, the hunt is fun, and sometimes…

Sometimes you get the gold.

The plan must never be to have a plan

2026-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

My writing process is typically thus:

I will bang out a stream of consciousness first draft, getting everything that I think I want to say out of my head and into text;
I will then read over that first draft and realise it’s not right. The fact is that while I may have had an idea of what I wanted to say, the piece iteslf has no fucking clue what it’s about. In fact, it’s garbage. I suck and should never write again;
I must now leave it for a day. Or a week. Or a month. And then, if I feel up to it, I will come back;
Usually I select-all-and-delete, then try and write a plan to actually figure out what the piece was really about;
That “plan” ends up being the final draft

The mistake I often make, which leads to the worst pieces, is to think I can jump directly to 4, skipping the first three stages on the way. Just write out what I want to say. How hard can it be?

But the point is that the writing doesn’t happen in stage 4. It happens in stage 3. And you can’t skip to stage 3, since it’s a reaction to the first two stages.

When you jump to 4, you end up in 2 for eternity.

You can’t plan this stuff, you can only write it.

Just sitting

2026-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The sky is pink as we drive back from Peebles, gently racing the sunset to avoid navigating country roads in the crisp twilight of the first of January.

“That’s definitely snow, isn’t it?” Anisa observes from the passenger seat. She reaches back to point this out to the kids but notices everyone else is asleep. She chuckles and goes back to staring happily out of the window, wondering aloud what it means when sheep lie down in the fields.

“Probably that they wanted to lie down” I muse, a smile on my face.

2026 is off to a good start. We’re full of steak pie and fresh air after a brisk family walk in the chill of the Tweed valley with Anisa’s mum, heading home now to settle in to a warm winter evening in front of the fire, working steadily through the small mountain of chocolate we’ve accumulated over the festive period.

We round a bend into my favourite stretch of road out of the borders: the long straight just before the approach to Penicuik, where the country opens out to wide skies, surrounded by hills but with enough space to truly feel “empty”.

Big sky country, a space to breathe.

This whole year just gone was “space to breathe”, but not always in a comfortable way. First, space came from being signed off, unable to do much but sit and reflect thanks to my illness. Then, space came from being laid off, privileged to find myself in the opposite situation: free to do whatever I wanted for a spell, fortunate enough to have runway to really think about what to do next.

Both were ultimately terrifying, and could easily have resulted in my being written off due to a case of mistaken identity.

The road cuts left now, narrowing, then veers right into a bend that I usually underestimate and take a little too fast without meaning to. Not this time, though: I have a van close behind me so have been keeping my speed down, to encourage the driver either to pass or to back off. It seems to be working as we come to the junction and I slow, dropping a gear before the turnoff to the right, and feeling the satisfying bite as I put on the power to take us up the hill. The van behind shoots off along the main road to Penicuik, as happy to part ways with me as I am with them.

The road ahead climbs into the hills and will pass through a few villages before rejoining the main road in about twenty minutes, a mix of fast stretches and slower residential patches. It’s a pleasant drive, with an undulating aspect that keeps things interesting without being too hairy. I know the road well enough that it’s easy to have fun along it without taking risks.

I return to my thoughts about mistaken identity as I let the road lead us home. The identity I had mistaken was my own, and I must have been making the mistake for decades. It took a conversation with a career coach (part of my redundancy package) to bring this into sharp focus. We were digging into my values, in order to try to “make the most” of this career break while I still had a bit of time to do so.

“I want to make an observation” she said, after I’d rattled off a list of things I enjoy, things I’m good at, things that give me energy and all those usual things that get brought up during any sort of personal growth conversation. “Every time you mention something you’re good at, you qualify it by saying that you’ve been told you’re good at it. Everything you say you enjoy is something that gives value to others. You take energy from how you make others feel.

“What do you do for you?”

I feel like she has asked me what the colour green sounds like. The words make sense, the question is clear and easily parsed, and I have no idea how to even begin to answer it. A huge, empty space opens inside me as I take the tissue she’s handed me. I notice I’m crying.

What do I do for me? I… doomscroll? Watch shitty YouTube videos? Drink coffee? These are suddenly seen for what they are: things that I do to avoid doing anything for me.

I meditate… does that count? It feels close, but incomplete. Meditating is like filling the car with fuel, or taking it to the wash. It keeps the car in good order, but it doesn’t tell you where to drive it.

What do I do for me?

The emptiness rears up again and I find myself not crying this time but panicking. My coach explains, reassuringly, that this is quite common, and that it’s often referred to as a void, but the reality is that there’s always something there. It’s just something I’m not seeing, something I’ve forgotten about, or I’m dismissing because it seems too obvious or trite.

The panic subsides a little and I find myself staring no longer into the void, but into a cave: a dark recess but one which has dimension, echo, signifiers of an interior world that is currently obscured by darkness, but to which I can feel my eyes adjusting.

I agree to see my coach again in a week, and to gently, kindly, explore this cave a little more in the meantime. I find myself wondering who’s in there, waiting for me to discover them.

The sky is still bright but the road is starting to blend in with the surrounding hills and fields. I bump the car’s headlamps on as we leave the last village, approaching the dual carriageway and final roundabout before we hit the ring road around Edinburgh. Oncoming cars blind with their own lights but we’re just coming back to street lights and so the dazzle is only temporary. I stop at a red light and notice that I’ve been leaning forward in my seat, peering, holding my breath. I take my hands off the wheel, stretch them one at a time, and sit back, exhaling and inhaling slow and steady.

It’s only a matter of hours into my week of exploration before I figure out who’s sitting in that cave. Recounting the coaching session to Anisa, I’m suddenly hit by a clear picture, like someone has found the light switch to the cave and thrown it. It takes a moment for the shock to die down, but there he is. Sitting at a typewriter, a stack of books to one side of him, a pile of articles, strategies, pitches, reports, journal entries, short stories, and notes to the other. Every single thing he’s ever read or written. A storyteller. He looks up and smiles.

The rest of the road home is pretty plain sailing. The snow comes to nothing, and the sky continues to churn through various hues of red and purple before settling down to an even dark blue from horizon to horizon. Once we cross the bypass it’s a straight shot back to our front door, and our snoozing passengers wake up just as we turn into our road. I ask Anisa if she can take everyone up to the house while I sit for a moment to decompress. She smiles and retrieves the family from the back.

The car is empty, quiet. I sit with myself, happy to have let 2025 tell me its story, and glad to have captured it for myself. 2026 brings a new job, new challenges, new stories, but for right now I just sit in my cave, watching the new year’s first light fade from the sky, truly content with my own company for the first time in years.

The library

2025-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Imagine if libraries had been invented just recently: all of human knowledge, way more than any one person could consume in a lifetime, in a single building. There’s no index yet, and you need special knowledge to access the building, but inside, every book, journal, article you could ever hope to imagine.

Overwhelming, but exciting. There’s no way you’ll be able to read everything, so you just dive in, reading whatever you like, following authors and their references to find new books, or picking random ones from the shelves. Exhilarating!

Then, someone invents the index. Now, if you know the right incantations, you can be much more specific in your search for knowledge, your creation of wisdom. Or not! You can still just grab a book from a random stack and dive in.

The point is that you now have options. New ways to interact: browsing, or searching.

Then someone else invents the standard library card. Suddenly, the majority of people in most countries in the world have complete, unfettered access to the library. They browse, find authors they like, find recommendations by those authors, or by friends.

You see where this is going. Some smart person realises that there’s money to be made, and starts selling advertising space in the indexes. It can be targeted too, since they know what you’re looking for, so can make advertising cards that sit alongside the categories.

Soon it’s hard to figure out what books are being “recommended” by the index vs those that are genuinely what you’re looking for.

Someone else realises that they can use the overwhelming feeling that the library generates as a way to make money. They set up a shop next door to the library that gives you the first chapter of any book to see if you like it. You read it and go back for more, and hey, there’s the second chapter. You go back again, but this time it’s the first chapter of a second book. Then the first chapter of a third book. They’re all good, so you go back and wow, there’s the third chapter of that first book! The next chapter is the first of a fourth book but you don’t like it.

But you go back the next day to see if you get the fourth chapter of that first book. Or maybe the second chapter of those other books you like. This time it’s an advert. But after the advert you get the second chapter of the second book and feel like you’ve won a prize.

You go back the next day. And the day after that. You don’t mind the adverts so much because sometimes they have pictures of cats. And you really like it when you get a new chapter of that book.

Meanwhile, fewer and fewer people are going to the library. The index maintainer decides to get in on the “curation” act and now offers a new service. You just ask a person at the front desk of the library what you want to know, and they tell you. You don’t even need to read the books any more, as this person read them all (mostly, kinda skimmed them to be honest), but you get the answer straight away. And boy does it sound compelling and authoritative. So much so that you feel authoritative too.

Nobody reads any more. They just pull levers on the slot machine, or ask questions and accept the answers and pat themselves on the back for being so well informed about the world.

The library is still there. Nobody has locked the doors or barred the entrances (though the world’s richest man seems to be paying angry people to stand outside with placards for… some reason?), but reading is hard and takes effort and who has the time to do that? Especially with so many cute cat pictures to look at, and you kinda get the information anyway.

The library is still there, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it stopped being for you.

Thank goodness we’re all too smart to have let that happen. The libraries are still there, all human knowledge at our fingertips. And we’re still reading.

Right?

Goldsworthy

2025-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

When we arrive, there’s a crowd of people milling around in the entrance hall, nobody looking too sure what to do. An official-looking person with a lanyard and some sort of scanner looks around the room. “Anyone else for the five thirty viewing?”

I look over at Anisa and we quickly glance around to see if we’re skipping ahead of anyone else. When nobody else moves, we shuffle towards the official, me frantically trying to make sure the QR codes on our tickets are visible on my phone screen.

“Thank you” he smiles after scanning our tickets. “The exhibition is on two levels, and starts just up these stairs.” We thank him and are on our way. Oddly, nobody else seems to be heading up the stairs, preferring to mill around and cause confusion for newcomers.

I wonder if this is part of the exhibit. It would be cool if it was, somehow.

The stone steps up to the first hall have a runner spilling down the centre, clearly sheepskin or clipped wool, with pink and blue dyes from the sheep still on it. I wonder what the evening will have in store.

I knew very little about Andy Goldsworthy before I attended the exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, a retrospective of fifty years of his work. Anisa had said a few times that she really wanted to go, and we had both then promptly forgotten about it. I had been reminded that week that this was the last weekend, and had booked tickets as a surprise. She had been thrilled.

I was curious, but no more than that. I assumed I would definitely be a “plus one” to this event, happy mainly to watch Anisa get excited about things. I always feel out of my depth at exhibitions, especially for people who are well known. I become painfully aware of how much I don’t know, and it has a tendency to distract me.

All of that ended when I got to the top of the stairs.

Barricading our way from one side of the hall to the other was what looked like a loosely-knitted wall, stretched from one pillar to another. The wall was all sorts of autumnal hues, red, orange, some green, some grey, some yellow. It looked very inviting to the touch, despite the signs strongly advising against this.

I moved closer, and realised that this was no wall of yarn. I felt myself drawn even closer, right to where the material was wound around the pillar, then connected back with itself to form the wall.

It was barbed wire. Miles of it, intricately wound, entwined, and then stretched across the hall. The whole thing was likely four metres high, perhaps eight across. The colours were completely natural, being the rusted and worn parts of the wire.

The whole thing demanded consideration of the craft of the construction. How had this been installed? It was a true installation, too, recruiting the extant pillars of the gallery to its cause. This was not something constructed elsewhere and then imported. The art had been created here, by hands.

I winced at the obvious injury that must have been sustained during its construction.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” a gallery employee was standing next to me. I realised that my nose was maybe a couple of inches from the barbs, my glasses off so that I could see more closely (my age being now advanced to the curse of constantly removing and replacing my glasses as the situation demands). I mumbled some awed “Yes, I was convinced it was wool…”.

“We get a lot of that. I got to watch the team installing this, and I still have no idea how they worked it. I’m sure there was a full health and safety inspection, but still…”

He trailed off, then started pointing out various details: the tufts of wool still caught in the barbs from unfortunate sheep who had strayed too close (much as I was doing now), the fact that the lines did not all go straight from one pillar to the other, but meandered, straying from their lanes to provide the occasional diagonal, connecting threads.

But throughout it all, I found myself disappointed. A team had produced this. Not an artist, but a group. And this was the first thing we saw? How connected was this Andy Goldsworthy to his art? Was he simply an art director, taking credit for the graft of others?

As I would learn, in a way yes, but if so, he had earned it.

We moved to the next rooms: a dark room filled with broken stones, which had been displaced from the ground when graves had been dug. This room was lit by a skylight during the day, but being the night time (Edinburgh in November rarely sees sunlight after 4pm) torches had been provided. The whole thing was oddly insistent, demanding that I see past the fact that it was “just a room full of stones” and instead grapple with the practicality of it. They had been moved, lifted, placed. They looked evenly laid out, still natural, but clearly this was not a natural occurrence. The artifice of nature in a gallery room, brought here at great effort, all to evoke… something. These had been displaced by humans after their lives had ended, and now were exhibited.

The art was impossible to engage with fully without the knowledge of the construction. I was starting to see a theme here even though I assumed another team had been employed here as well.

The next room was a collection of reeds suspended from the ceiling. Again, these were four metres tall at least, impossibly long for reeds, and arranged in a maze around the perimeter of the skylight (this room was the twin of the previous one with the stones). In pitch darkness, we were provided torches, the light from those walking through the maze casting moving shadows like bar-codes on the walls. My vertigo kicked in and I had to leave Anisa to explore alone while I steadied myself on the back wall, listening to another gallery staff member explaining that there was no fixtures to keep the reeds in place. They were jammed into a shelf at the ceiling level, and then subsequent reeds were jammed into the hollow ends of the ones above, leading to the surprising height. There they dangled, free-floating. When some fell, they would be carefully replaced before the next showing.

I found the patterns on the wall mesmerising, not just because of the vertigo they induced. I found myself jealous of being unable to explore the maze myself.

The next room featured a wall taken up by dried mud, a vibrant red colour and cracked from the baking heat of the sun. Four by four metres, at least, and mounted vertically so that the viewer felt they were looking down on the ground. Cracks regular to the sides divided the otherwise random breaks into almost perfect squares, making me wonder what mechanism caused such regularity. Was the surface prepared in some way to force this regularity, or was there some underlying crystal structure to the mud? The plaque (much like the rest) offered no such information, only the raw details of what I was looking at. Meaning and understanding were something the viewer was clearly invited to bring themselves.

Another wall showed pieces made from a dead hare whose carcass had been filled with snow and allowed to drain on to parchment. As gruesome as this sounded, the results were stunningly beautiful, black and red and white ink-blot tests upon which to project your own ideas. Prior to being told the method of creation for these pieces, one had revealed to me the image of a dancing hare or rabbit, feet outstretched, ears high above its head as it whirled like a top.

Onward, we moved to the centrepiece, an oak “walkway” along the length of the next room. Wind-fallen branches of oak trees arranged in two rows along the floor, from the outside looking simply like piles, but from either end of the path between, the edges resolved to sharp, crisp lines. Walking the path, it was clear that like the reeds, there was nothing holding these pieces of wood in place other than the tangle of the other branches themselves. And yet regularity emerged from the chaos.

By this point I had ceased caring about how many or how few people had been involved in these creations, and was simply allowing them to flow through me as experiences. There was something mystical about the colocation of such natural, seemingly randomly assembled materials and the harsh, mechanical regularity that demanded attention be paid to the assembly.

The room after was the one that broke me. Photograph after photograph of scenes in forests. A felled tree with an interesting crack in its bark, but with vividly golden leaves applied to the edge of the crack, then darker and darker hues applied further out, till the crack seemed a black void surrounded by glowing light. The same effect achieved with the same crack, but this time using fallen snow and judicious clearing of the snow in layers to highlight the crack as though cut through sprinkled icing sugar. In another photograph, a particular branch in a pile of branches was chosen to be covered in bright yellow leaves, plastered down to give the effect that the branch itself had been painted.

Another picture showed snow cleared from a succession of fallen branches to give the impression that a dark path had been cut across them all, a jarring negative space in the snow-covered dell.

On and on these photographs went, one optical illusion after another, gently snapping my brain.

I had to leave the room before it became too much. I’m still unsure how to name the feeling that I had. Overwhelm, perhaps, mixed with awe, mixed with some dissonance arising from trying to square the natural setting and materials with the artifice.

We moved on, downstairs now to his earlier work.

Up till now, the rooms themselves had been compounding somewhat. As I moved between the pieces, I found that each new piece made me review the last in new light, such that I had a distinct impression of carrying an increasing “load” as the rooms progressed. I suspect this is what lead to that last room overwhelming me in some way, the common threads of the work all colliding and giving me a glimpse of an overarching… what? Not narrative. I did not feel that he had been trying to tell a cohesive story with these pieces. It was more that each piece had come from a common source, a drive, a need to express… something.

It was downstairs that this something started to make sense. There were only three rooms downstairs, with a more intimate, restrained feeling. This was clearly his earlier work, and gave more of an impression of the artist himself. Here he is, hauling himself through twisted trees and filming the endeavour on super-8 film. Another, he’s walking through frozen ground barefoot, the ice breaking under his weight as we watch his feet, blue and muddy, plunge into the freezing bog below. Each step making itself felt in my own feet, the artist’s silence with each step as impressive as any of the works upstairs.

Then here he is spitting into the air, or at least here are some photographs of him trying to capture it, failing most of the time but in one frame, there he is, time frozen at just the right moment. Yet more of him trying to capture a bundle of sticks thrown into the air. These shots are all taken on film, meaning that nobody had any idea whether any of them would be workable till after the film was developed.

Now he’s trying to capture a rainbow by hitting a pool with a stick, and photographing as the droplets hit the sun. Two or three successful shots, but how long had all this taken? How many rolls of film discarded, how many visits to the pond to try again, how many days where the light wasn’t right?

Then finally, the earliest work, but echoing into the future: split stones arranged such that each gap aligns, rendering the viewer unable to unsee the single, unified crack through the stones. Or a perfect circle of golden leaves on green, made by ripping leaves and sticking them to matching ones and arranging to create the illusion.

All through, this striving to shock us into seeing… what? I came away with a profound sense of humans as being a part of nature, and of our difficulty in seeing this. We dismiss as “unnatural” anything we create, but are any of these pieces “unnatural”? Any more than an inexplicable boulder in an otherwise empty plain, deposited aeons prior by some wandering glacier? Or the Giant’s Causeway of Fingal’s Cave, once thought so unnaturally regular as to be clear evidence of construction, but now understood to simply be a result of the way lava cools?

I left the exhibition somewhat stunned, feeling both apart from and a part of the natural world, sad that I could not immediately return to see the initial works with these fresh eyes (given that this was the last day of the exhibition), but also quite sure that part of this impermanence was the point. We are all our own creations, in many ways, and the biggest revelation to me was that the creation is as much in what we choose to see around us, what we pay attention to, as in how we choose to respond to it.

Hot chocolate season

2025-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Now that we’re firmly in the depths of Decorative Gourd Season, it’s time to crack out my hot chocolate recipe. I say “my” hot chocolate recipe as the kids usually begin a campaign around November for the return of “Dad’s hot chocolate”, but in truth it’s a simplified version of a Babish recipe.

Which itself is an imagining of Flanders’s recipe from The Simpson’s Movie.

So I guess it’s interpretation all the way down.

Anyway, I’m not going to duplicate it here. Go and watch Babish’s video and create your own interpretation, since that seems to be the tradition. One word of warning, though: this shit is rich. It’s pretty good in a keep cup when out on an autumnal walk, but if drinking at home, do not plan on doing much after the first mug. Maybe just lying on the couch to recover.

It also works very well as a vehicle for rum, if you are so inclined. Apparently.

Positive bias

2025-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

When was the last time you answered a greeting question without thinking? The kind of thing I mean is this:

How are you doing today?

It’s a standard opening, which essentially means “I acknowledge your presence with my words”. The actual words themselves are rarely important, and one of the key agreed norms here is that the person initiating the greeting rarely actually wants to know the answer to the question. There’s a reason why the following exchange reads as comedy:

How are you doing today?

Oh well, you know. The bus was early to the stop which frustratingly made me late as I was on time, just in time to see the bus leave. And then the school called to ask me to come and pick up one of the kids as they were sick in class, so I had to bail back home, get the car keys. That said, after that I decided that we should make the most of the morning together so I called in a family support day at work and we watched some movies snuggled under a blanket on the sofa. Then she was sick again, so that ended that. How are you?

…

But the insidious thing I notice, at least around where I live, is that the answer really does hold a message, even when it’s terse. It’s often something like one of the following:

Oh, not too bad

Getting there

Could be worse

Surviving

Mustn’t grumble

All of these clearly position the default answer as being some form of “bad”, and so they seek to reassure the asker that things are not quite as bad as they would expect them to be.

Think about that. I know negativity bias is a thing, but think about how many times we engage in this exchange in a month, or week, or even day. How many times we repeat the mantra, implicitly reminding ourselves that the best we could hope for is a neutral day, and that in most cases, we’re happy to settle for somewhere slightly north of “the worst things could possibly be”.

What effect does this have on our view of the world?

And what if we could flip it. What if, instead of the default “better than disaster” answer or the long rambling life story, we said something like:

Actually, my day’s going pretty well thanks. How about you?

If we said that enough, might we start to believe it? And if we start to believe it, might our brains (hard-wired as they are for confirmation bias) start looking for evidence to support it?

I mean, it might be worth a try.

So yes, I’m definitely doing better than fine. I’m pretty damn good right now, thanks. How about you?

Systemic trust

2025-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them”, at least according to David Allen. This is all well and good, but why do my systems always end up with me still holding everything in my head?

It’s trust. It’s always trust. I lose trust in my systems. And then I burn them down and start again. It’s a pattern. Part of it, of course, is painting the hammer (“ooh, shiny new app!”), but I’ve started to notice a pattern behind the pattern.

See, every time I start a new system, there’s a honeymoon period. It does work. I do trust it.

Then suddenly, after weeks or months, I notice that it’s stopped working. The ideas have started to build up, unloved. The inbox is overflowing, the momentum is gone.

I wake at 3 in the morning, trying to remember if I added that critical task to the project. I grab my phone, it’s not in the inbox, it’s not in the project. Where is it? I add it to the inbox and go back to sleep, but it’s fitful. Will I really ever see it again?

See, the system has gone from a place of action to a dumping ground. Despite my best efforts to keep things “organised”, all I’m doing is shuffling tasks from place to place. The projects end up with a mix of things to do, ideas for things to do, notes that I think are important, and very little room for actual clarity on what the next thing to work on is.

I’ve gone from farming to gardening. It’s exhausting, leaving me very little time to harvest any crops. And I’ve returned to holding the important stuff in my brain again.

But when did it happen? This time, I found the trap.

The systems always start out the same: a simple list. A brain dump of everything in my mind. The pattern is familiar to anyone who’s spent a minute looking at productivity. Get it all out, then organise it into actions. Notice where an “action” is really a project, and break it down into actual actions.

So I did this, but decided not to do the breakdown. Not yet. What would happen if I just left the “get a new job” project as a task on the list, alongside “take out the bin” and “email changes to the bathroom refit quote”?

It was so crazy it might just work. It also aligned with the underlying idea of this system from Mark Forster, which he calls “resistance zero”. You just have one list, and work on whatever you feel zero resistance for. The hook is that you have to read the whole list, every time you’re choosing what to work on next.

I combined this with Kourosh Dini’s idea of a “visit”. Rather than thinking of “get a new job” as a binary “Only check it off when it’s complete”, I tried thinking of it as an invitation to do “something” on the project. To sit with it.

So, I started. Sat with “get a new job” and figured out there were four or five things I could do right now to move it forward. I added those things to the list, picked a couple, and worked on them.

All good.

The day wore on, and I made progress on the list. I was using Things at the time, just using the “anytime” view to see everything in one list. Ideas kept coming up for actions I could take to get a job, and I added them to the bottom of the list. Resistance remained high to them, so they stayed on the list.

Day turned to night, night turned to day, and in the light of the morning, I saw that I truly, really had a project on my hands. Half of the tasks were to do with the Get a Job project. I was glossing over them as a unit, and what I really wanted to do was see them all together. I wanted to work on “get a job”, to visit with it, to shut everything else out and work on that, to make progress on it. I wanted it to be organised, so that I could get a clear view of it.

So I made a project.

I moved all the related tasks into the project.

And though I didn’t quite realise it yet, the trap was sprung.

Projects feel inevitable. A project is just a list of related actions that build to an outcome. “Get a job” is not an action. I can’t “just” do that. I need to update my CV, find job adverts, write cover letters, write emails, consider what I even want to do, budget out how much money I need and so on.

So we create projects, whether it’s a page in the notebook, a heading in the text file, or an actual “Project” in the to-do app. This becomes a container for all the things, all the actions I listed above, and so on. The organisation feels like it’s progress, like “Okay, so now I can see everything I need to do”.

But all that’s actually happened is that we’ve created needless complexity. We’ve hidden all those actions behind the goal. We now have to work on two things: getting a job, and those actions. It can be easy to fall into the trap of just completing the actions, rather than heading for the outcome.

Worse than that, though, was what I had actually done. I had created an albatross. A shrine to the idea of the outcome.

See, by giving the outcome its own space, it had become separated from the bit of me that did the work. I now had two jobs: doing the work, and planning the work. This is fine when you have a team, but I’m just me.

Except I’m not just me. I am managing a team. I’m managing my workload right now, I’m delegating things to future me, and I’m picking up stuff that past me couldn’t get to.

But past me doesn’t know jack shit about my current context. They guess, but they don’t know. Those actions they left me: are they still relevant? Do I need to preserve them somewhere?

And what about future me? Sure, that idea past me had to reach out to my old boss and see if they have anything interesting I could help with, I don’t think that’s relevant just now, but what if future me loves the idea?

Better keep it around.

Because the project is a safe haven for cruft. It’s separate from the “main list” of stuff to do, so all manner of crap can accumulate in the projects. It hangs around “just in case”, because I’m sure past me had some good intentions.

But by over-indexing on past me, I’m dooming future me to drown in shit.

And guess what. Future me, at some point, is going to say “yeah, fuck that” and stop even looking at the project. They’re going to go back to holding it all in their head.

Trap sprung, future me fucked.

So what now? Am I consigned to concluding that we can’t complete complex things? Obviously not. Well, hopefully that’s obvious.

The problem isn’t the complexity. It’s not even the projects. It’s the accumulation. Projects just make it easier to hide the accumulation.

Ultimately, it comes down to curation. It comes down to editing. Past me just comes up with ideas, suggestions. That’s all the list is: Suggestions from past me.

Dini talks about “honouring” the past self by at least showing up to those suggestions. Deciding not to do them is absolutely a valid course of action.

But I wasn’t even showing up. I was kicking the can down the road, and I was giving myself permission to do this because they were all tied to “get a job”. So everything remained on the table till that project was completed.

My solution? Stop organising.

When I keep everything on the one list, there’s not only nowhere to hide, but I start to feel it when the list gets too long. There’s always going to be more I could add to the list, and I will likely add it, but by adding it to the one list, it makes it more obvious what stuff I can cut. What stuff I can show up to and say “thanks past me. I’m not going to do this now, but if it comes up again future me can add it back”.

So the project process now is quite simple:

Decide to work on “get a job”;
Add some actions to the one list;
Work on some of those actions till I decide to stop working on “get a job”;
SCORE OFF “GET A JOB”, and then add it to the end of the list again for future me to work on when they want to;
SCORE OFF ANY REMAINING ACTIONS FROM 3. If future me needs them, they’ll come back.

Because it turns out the trust isn’t only in the system holding the ideas. It’s in trusting the system to hold the ideas only as long as they’re useful, in trusting present me to weed out which ideas are not worth holding on to, and in trusting my brain to have more ideas in future.

After all, having ideas is what it’s for.

Waiting

2025-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

That horrifying moment when you’re working from the coffee shop (or, let’s be honest, the pub), and you nip to the bar to get a top up, and you leave your stuff on the table because, you know, you trust that people are generally good and honest, but more to the point you can still see the table and besides you’re also between the table and the door, so that if anyone grabs the laptop you’ve got a comfortable amount of time before they run past to position yourself to tackle them to the ground before the even get near the outside.

And you take your drink gratefully from the bartender. Or barista, perhaps. And you amble back to the table, basking in the glow of the general honesty of humanity, and feeling warm and fuzzy in the way toddlers do when they’re cuddling their toy dinosaurs. And you sit to write, but then you realise you need the loo.

And now you’re sitting in the stall, trying to go as fast as you can because you’re convinced that the old boy at the back has been eyeing your kit for hours, and now is his time to strike. He’s downed his pint, wiped the froth from his grizzled chops, and has snatched the laptop, the expensive laptop that you bought with the advance on the work that’s currently sitting on it, and he’s working his way to the door, furiously shuffling, the laptop in one hand, walking cane in the other. And so you pinch it off and wash hands and burst forth from the gents.

And the old boy is, indeed, gone. And the table is empty.

It’s fucking empty.

You’re unsure whether to laugh or cry, slightly stunned by the accuracy of your deepest paranoia, are you perhaps psychic? The table is clear. Everything has gone. Jacket, laptop, backpack, even the drink you just got. They’ve even changed the flowers.

And then you notice you were looking at the wrong table, and your stuff is still there, and the old boy is standing next to you, looking like he’s about to pee himself.

You jump, startled.

“Excuse me”, he says, motioning to the loo. “But are you finished? I’ve been waiting…”.

Morning

2025-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes mornings need to unfold on their terms. You go to bed the night before with Plans, to wake up, feed the dog, read, meditate, shower, work out, then go for a walk before starting the day.

But the morning has its own Plans, mainly involving sleeping and being grumpy about the amount of light that is infiltrating your cave of a bedroom. Sometimes the morning needs fought, beaten to submission.

But sometimes the morning brings a big stick and you take one look at it and say to hell with that fight, I didn’t even want to meditate anyway.

And then it’s nine o’clock and there’s not even any coffee yet but the bed is warm and it’s a Sunday anyway and frankly you must have needed it.

And the trick then, what you absolutely must not do, is relitigate the fight you avoided earlier. No, it would not have been better if you’d taken on the morning, armed as it was to the teeth. You made the right call.

So enjoy the warmth of the bed and the chirp of the birds outside. Let the morning have its victory.

You both deserve it this once.