This blog/newsletter is for artists. For storytellers. For lateral thinkers. For multi-hyphenates. For chaos goblins. For the square pegs. For those who refuse to follow a trodden path. Those who feel everything so, so deeply. For those who are still working things out.
Expect weekly-ish journeys down various rabbit holes straight into your inbox, with selected essays published here.
Want to know my secret formula for getting out of creative rut? Just kidding. There is no recipe to creativity. Even "bibles" of creativity like The Artist's Way don't suit everyone (I never got past the morning pages!) But here’s what tends to work for me. I’m calling them “steps” but they are...
In rock climbing, beta refers to the intended way of ascending a route, and specific climbing techniques required to overcome the key challenges. It’s intended to give you a roadmap to a climb - making your life a little easier in outdoor climbing, or challenging you in just the right...
They told us that curiosity killed the cat but it's a freaking lie. In the original 16th century telling - and until the late 1800s - it was care (with the meaning of worry) that lead to the cat’s demise. And somewhere along the way, care was replaced by curiosity. Why? No one really knows, apart...
In the actual play podcast (if you’ve never heard the term, think improvised radio play) Chapter and Multiverse that my teen introduced me to, one of the characters, Mini Smithson (played by Lydia Nicholas) is an alien pretending to be human – but not succeeding very much (and it is...
I’m staring at a blank page today. I’m not quite sure what I want to write about. I have so many drafts and half-started essays, all of them competing for my attention. It frustrates me. Should I write about walking the tightrope of a public creative practice, and the dangers of seeking out...
My two current crushes - an intellectual one (anthropologist David Graeber) and entertainment one (comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan) recently collided when the latter casually quoted the former in a podcast interview on Adventuring Academy. Sidenote: Adventuring Academy is a Dropout TV show...
My Oddbox is delivered overnight and a few industrious ants get inside. Normally it’s just a couple of them and I manage to unload the contents - a mix of rescued fruit and veg - before taking it into the garden for the ants to escape into the grass. Not today. Today they run for it - and there’s...
My grandmother never told me much about her experience of the siege. We learned a lot about it at school - the 900 days, the 1.5 million dead, the heroism of the people, the Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, the “this side of the street is more dangerous during an aerial attack” (the signs are still...
In the final chapters of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the authorities have finally figured out what was causing the turmoil that has permeated the otherwise perfectly calibrated society of synchronised workers and glass houses. The problem, it turned out, was that some humans...
I decided to plant a garden. Like, an edible kitchen garden, with apple trees and herbs and radishes and peas. But also, wildflowers. Lots of wildflowers. There are three main problems with my plan: I have literally zero idea how to do any of it. I grew up in a high rise block of flats in a city,...