Identity is weird. I’m a writer, but saying that casts this weird spell on people. I think the spell comes from a good place, a place of compassion and curiosity.

But it’s a deadly spell.

“So… how’s the writing going?”

Immediately I feel a fraud. How is the writing going? I haven’t published to the blog for ages, haven’t sat down to actually put an essay together for weeks.

No, months.

Who says I’m a writer?

“Oh, you know. It’s going”

The deflation is palpable. They’re rooting for me, they want to hear about the progress on the novel, or the collection of short stories, or the self-help book, or the… something. Anything.

How can you be a writer without something to show for it?

And yes, that’s a point of view, but what they’re really looking for is whether my writing has become work yet. Am I cranking out words every day? Am I doing the reps? Am I putting in the hours? Do I have projects and goals? Am I going to do NaNoWriMo this year?

What’s the plan?

And there is no plan. Writing is not a job, for me. Making it a job will make it lesser. Neither is it a hobby.

It’s just a thing that makes me feel at home.

Sometimes in my life, I don’t feel at home. I feel washed away, adrift on someone else’s idea of what my life should be. In some seasons, that’s necessary, a journey away from home that brings with it some worthwhile reward, or some unquantifiable progress in some part of my life.

In others, it’s just exile. A meaningless drift away from what I hold dear. A drift of inches and degrees, where I’m suddenly in the middle of the ocean, lost, before I notice I’ve left the shore.

How does one become lost at sea? Two ways, slowly then suddenly.

Writing can sometimes be a lifeline in those drifts, a way to set sail for home, to remember the route, to follow the compass and spy land. But sometimes I’m so far from home that the writing itself feels alien and unfamiliar.

And there is nothing I’d rather be doing less in those moments than writing.

Does that mean I’m no longer a writer? Do we stop breathing between inhale and exhale?

Writing is home. Sometimes it can bring me home, but sometimes I have to fight to return before the writing can come.

And so I fight.

And then, I write.

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.

My writing process is typically thus:

1. 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;
2. 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;
3. 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;
4. Usually I select-all-and-delete, then try and write a plan to actually figure out what the piece was really about;
5. 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.

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.

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?