MailerLite unfortunate switcheroo, choosing your newsletter provider, and the technical nitty-gritty behind my transition away from Substack.

When Diana Gabaldon sat down to write her first novel, she did it for practice. She’d not written fiction before and figured that the best way to learn – and see if she’s any good at it – is to just write one. She settled on historical fiction because, by her own admission, if it…

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…

Hi friends, These past couple of years have been somewhat of a public unravelling as I’ve been figuring out where I want to go next. I’m no stranger to flying by the seat of my pants, following my nose, and figuring stuff out as I go (and it has worked out pretty well for me so far – from…

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…

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…

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 keep thinking that it must feel weird for you to read me writing about gardening all of a sudden. Like, what does it have to do with photography? Probably nothing. Probably everything. I’m still figuring it out. My brain doesn’t work in a linear way. It swirls and shoots to random places, making…

…if you knew it was the last time?

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,…