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Time. Loop.

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There’s a road junction in St Budeaux that acts like an elongated roundabout. The effect of this is that a car heading in one direction can stop for you at the zebra crossing and then as you walk on thirty seconds later you can see the same car now seemingly heading the opposite way. On one side of the road there used to be an old style advertising billboard – every few months someone would come along and paste up a new advert to replace the existing one. A couple of years ago the billboard was taken down and replaced with a modern equivalent – electronic this time. When it was first installed it was all black, presumably awaiting the first electronic ad to be launched on to the screen. Two years later it is still black. It’s become its own black hole. Capitalism has sucked so much out of the world that there’s nothing left to consume or no one left who can afford to consume it. (Either that or it’s a very clever art installation). When I traverse this neighbourhood I always walk o...
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Time. Travel.

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Knicks in five Knicks in five, it’s like a secret password being spread across the streets of New York.   What it refers to is the winners of a basketball league. Winners of a playoff series that has gripped a certain segment of US society. It’s 7am in the UK. Sunday morning. It’s already been light for a couple of hours here as we approach giddily towards the summer solstice. But in New York it’s 2am. Night time. The street’s spilling over with celebrating home fans. Knicks in five There’s lights and noise. Modified chaos. Somewhere a bus is set on fire. Police and first responders arrive shortly afterwards. A blur of sirens. Streets are blocked off. Crowd control. People peer through the window of an all night pizza parlour. But there’s no longer access to the entrance. Scenes like these, a barely narrated rolling news, used to be the province of disasters. Terrorist attacks or fatal storms. Channels like CNN broadcasting 24/7. Filling up hour after hour with background...
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I Am A Swan

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Swans live very narrow, prescribed lives. One day for a swan is pretty much like any other. They inhabit a small area of territory that might be considered their home turf and they rarely go beyond it. At night, swans will sleep, much like you and I. They will usually sleep on the water as they don’t really have any predators on water that pose a threat to them. On land they might be prey to foxes or the like, although even on land there are few creatures that could take on a fully grown adult swan. During the day Swans spend a lot of time foraging for food. Swans are vegetarians. Most of what they eat isn’t that nutrient rich, so they need to eat a lot of it. The rest of the time is often spent in grooming. So the daily life of a swan sees them move between a few different locations within their territory, looking for food and keeping their feathers in shape. They aren’t exactly creatures of habit in one sense – they don’t sleep in the same spot every night, you won’t find them ...
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The Ballad of Trago Mills

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Cornwall is that other Eden. It’s that elongated thin sliver of land at the end of the country. Although my mother was born in Sri Lanka, she grew up in Cornwall. I’ve lived here now for over half of my adult life. I’ve lived here for all but one year of this current millennium. I don’t claim to be Cornish because I am not. I was not born here. I am not the son of someone who was born here. None of that matters. Cornwall is my home. For seventeen years I lived in Penzance. The end of the line. I didn’t fall asleep on a Great Western train and find myself there, but there are surely worse ways to lead your life. Beyond Penzance are the moors of Penwith. Beyond Penzance are small villages and remote communities. Wide empty spaces. Farms. Stone circles. Megalithic sites. Out on the moors the winds blow strong. At the top of Carn Kenidjack (the hooting carn) you can see across to three separate coastlines. In summer when every square inch of beach is taken by visiting tourists, there...
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The Path of Least Resistance

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In the song I Love A Man In Uniform  The Gang of Four sang: ‘To have ambitions was my ambition’, but for the most part I've lacked even that. For me it was always, ‘The path of least resistance.’   as sung by The Human League on their song of the same name. When I went to be interviewed for a job at the tax office in Southend, the candidate before me came out and disclosed that the job wasn’t suitable for him as he needed hours that fitted around his college course. He then proceeded to share all the questions he’d been asked, enabling me to go into the interview fully prepared. The job was part time (two weeks on/ two weeks off – hence the wrong type of part time for the college guy) and at the lowest paygrade. I was more than qualified academically for a higher position but I didn’t want the extra responsibilities. (I think they even asked if I’d applied for the wrong position when they saw my educational record). I moved to Bristol because my sister lived there, so ...
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The Weather Prophets

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I started writing this blog in winter and I’m reaching the conclusion in late spring. If the story it tells has not been linear, then neither has the weather. Winter 2026 was cold and extraordinarily wet. Spring signified itself by a change to drier and more temperate conditions. April days were often bright and warm. May is different. Temperatures regressed. Wind has aided in modifying how warm it’s felt. Rain has, to a lesser degree, returned. Weather is a mood signifier for me. I hate the cold. Therefore I hate the wind. I’m not a fan of rain. I thrive in the warmth and the sun, in the longer daylight hours of summer. I connect on a primeval level to our ancestors, getting up when the sun comes up. I choose to read outside, utilising the natural light. Talk of the weather is a cliché for the British, but the truth is simply that we experience more of it. It’s a fact of geography, our position as a small island surrounded by sea on all sides. In Montreal the weather is more extre...
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What Four Words

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Memory is pliable. Memory is unreliable. Less than a week ago there is fighting and a stand off between rival swans, who are highly territorial creatures. Then yesterday I see a group of five waiting underneath the café for feeding time. Although as all swans tend to look alike, who can truly tell which group is which. Today there are only two again, two as normal. So much so that I wonder if I made up the group of five the day before. As you age, so your grasp of everything becomes looser. The internet is aging too, and remembering less. Or it is changing. LLMs (large language models) are trained on data that is often false. These falsehoods are taken on board by humans and they become accepted truths. A feedback loop is formed and as time passes, we all move further away from reality. That’s the crux of it as I see it. To change the world you no longer have to do something, perhaps all you have to do is convince the world that you did something. In my high school days I to...
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