Writing.

Creative writing, short stories, general musings.

  • The Void

    The school playground was where it started. Little Iris, Penny Landower’s daughter, was the first to spot it at lunchtime: a small patch at the far end of the junior playground where the ground should be, about the size of a child’s fist. Something didn’t look right about it. She kicked a little dirt at it, tried nudging it with her toe, but there was nothing there. Then her friends called out to her in the middle of their game, and she forgot about it, as children do. But being the curious, thoughtful child that she was, she returned to it at afternoon break, to see if it was still there. Sure enough, it was there alright (or wasn’t there, if you get my drift) and, what’s more, it had grown. Now it was about the size of a dinner plate. Iris frowned and screwed up her eyes thoughtfully, trying to make sense of it. She crouched down and peered closer, turning her head to inspect it side-on, but she couldn’t really see anything. Jimmy noticed and came over to look. He wasn’t too sure what he was seeing, but he was a little less cautious than Iris. He took a long stick, the one he’d a moment ago been contemplating starting a sword fight with, and poked at it. He couldn’t see anything different, but his stick didn’t meet any resistance. It just sort of disappeared into the patch of ground that wasn’t there, so part of the stick wasn’t really there either. It was strangely unsettling but sort of fascinating at the same time.

  • In Praise of Libraries

    Quiet places for soothing your soul. Unassuming spaces where you can wander for hours, lose yourself browsing the shelves, discovering hidden gems or just enjoying the peace. A low murmer of background chatter, words spoken gently, carefully, not wanting to disturb. The laugh or occasional shout of a young child frantically shushed by a harried parent, the cry of a small baby, hungry, overtired — but you forgive it here because this space is for everyone. A world-between-worlds, where you can pick up a tome and travel through time and space, or just enjoy a moment of respite in the here and now.

  • Little Websites Everywhere

    I am building a website, for work. It feels like a radical act these days. I am not using an LLM, I am coding with my own hands, wading through documentation, tinkering, reverse engineering, console logging my way to understanding. Learning new skills, refusing to hand them off to an unthinking machine.

  • Acceptance is what they want you to feel

    I recently watched Lauren Celenza’s talk, Living Through an AI Takeover Without Losing Your Soul from Beyond Tellerrand conference. The title hooked me, mainly because the soul is precisely the thing I fear we’re in danger of losing from the things that many of us hold dear — music, art, hobbies, learning, meaningful work, human relationships. “Grief” is a word that increasingly comes up when talking about AI, and that resonates with me. To be clear, I am not grieving for an imagined, improbable future when super-intelligent machines wipe out humanity. I am grieving for the very real harms being caused by AI right now: harms to our planet, our creative industries, our shared notions of reality, our childrens’ brains. An insightful quote from Lauren’s presentation:

  • Animal Intelligence

    I’ve long felt uneasy about zoos. While I believe there is some value in giving wild animals sanctuary, to study them and to care for them (especially when they cannot safely be released into the wild), and to educate the general population, in reality many zoos are crowded, noisy places with too-small enclosures that cannot help but be distressing environments for animals that should be roaming free. I suspect this is a conflict many people who love animals feel, including the zookeepers. We are torn between excitement and awe at seeing a majestic, wild animal close up and sorrow that we have taken them out of their world against their will, instead of encountering them in their natural habitat. Ultimately, zoos serve humans rather than animals, and it is heartbreaking to witness animals clearly suffering when surrounded by human noise and activity.

  • Reclaiming Space

    An underrated parenting milestone is the day you can finally claim your living room back. I barely remember what my living room looked like without a haphazard assortment of toys, games and books strewn around it. My son recently turned 10 and we’ve been in this house almost as long. There have been several attempts at tidying over the years, of clearing out old junk (saying goodbye to all the noisy, brightly-coloured plastic was a blessed relief), which was quickly replaced by new junk. But we stopped short of a concerted effort to really make the living room nice.

  • Paddington the Fox

    In the quiet evening hours, as the sun was going down, a lone figure could be observed at the end of the platform. Ears pricked and nose in the air, ever alert to danger, she scampered back and forth, in search of scraps left behind by the returning commuters. She might be lucky and find a half-eaten pasty, or a sausage roll dropped in haste. Those were her favourites. Sometimes it was just a few crisps, and on the worst days she had to make do with licking clean a discarded greasy wrapper. She usually found something though.

  • Escape

    A little slice of freedom is the sweetest feeling. I’m on a platform, waiting for my train to London to spend two days reconnecting with old friends, mooching around art galleries, visiting my 90-year-old Nana, swimming, eating cake and drinking coffee. Despite my busy schedule for this whirlwind trip, it’s the most relaxed I’ve felt in a long time. An escape from work, studying, parenting, planning, and the long list of domestic chores that never end.

  • Stage Fright

    It’s in moments before you go out there and face your audience that you know with absolute certainty. You know deep down in your bones, with every fibre of your being, that you’re never doing this again. Why put yourself through this? Your throat constricts. Your tongue feels like sandpaper. You feel like you need to drink constantly, and at the same time you need to go to the toilet for the thousandth time, because otherwise you’re absolutely, definitely going to wet yourself on stage. Every muscle in your body is rigid, while your limbs simultaneously feel like jelly. Uncoordinated, uncontrollable. People talk to you, you nod and smile politely, while all you can hear is the maelstrom in your head, the rushing of blood in your veins. The room lurches. Just putting one foot in front of another takes all your powers of concentration. You know without a doubt that you’ll go to pieces the moment you get out there, that there’s no way you can go through with this. But you do it anyway. Because it’s too late to back out now. Because not doing it would be worse, somehow.

  • Live Music: Alanis Morissette and Skunk Anansie

    Yesterday I took a trip down to Exeter with a good friend to watch Alanis Morissette play Powderham Castle. Alanis is one the artists that had a significant influence on my youth: I listened to Jagged Little Pill obsessively, its raw, righteous female anger awaking something deep within me. In those days big-name, North American acts rarely toured in the UK, and rarer still played anywhere close enough for my teenage self to scrape together the funds for a ticket, train travel and an overnight stay in an unfamiliar city. The only chance I got to see some of them was when they headlined festivals like Glastonbury which, although expensive even then for a teenager, at least gave me the opportunity to work for my ticket, and a chance to tick of a whole lot of my bucket-list artists all in one place. I never had a shot at seeing Alanis in her heyday, and had more or less resigned myself to the idea that I never would.

  • Sparrow

    It was as I was pulling into the driveway that I spotted it. I thought it was a mouse at first. A tiny creature frantically trying to insert its tiny body under the garage door, whether for shelter or escape I don’t know. I shut the car door and walked over slowly. The creature increased its frantic scrabbling then, realising it wasn’t going to get anywhere with the garage door, found a narrow strip of shelter under the garden gate. Not the best idea, considering the garden is the cat’s domain.

  • Clear Night

    I sit at the table in our small back garden, ice-cold drink in hand. The condensation on the glass is refreshing under my fingertips. A little light leaks from inside the house, not enough to read by, but I don’t want to anyway. Now is the time to collect my thoughts.

  • Open Mic Night

    My band played our first gig last night: an open mic night at Mr Wolf’s in Bristol. It was raw and chaotic, we couldn’t really hear each other all that well and we made a lot of mistakes. But I’m still feeling good about it.

  • Playing Music Live

    Tonight my band, Green Sirens, make our live debut at an open mic night in Bristol. It’s been 20 years since I’ve played music live. I feel like I usually feel just before I deliver a talk: nervous, excited, scared I’ll be facing an audience full of professionals who are there to find flaws in what I do. All the same irrational feelings, when really it’s a much bigger deal in your head than in real life, and no one cares that much. It’s only an open mic night, after all. I hope I can relax and enjoy it, as I usually do when we’re rehearsing and I’m pretty sure I used to do back in the old days with my high school band. But playing live as a 42-year-old feels like it comes with more baggage than in your teens. People expect you to be good, I guess. I must be a far better player than back then – I’ve spent years seriously knuckling down and practising like I never did when I was younger. My technique has definitely improved a lot. But I still never really feel I’m a good drummer, far less a great one. I play for fun, and because it feels good, just like when I write: it’s absorbing and consuming, and I feel a deeper connection to something bigger. That’s what I hope to get from playing live too — that and the rush of adrenalin you get after doing something that scares and thrills you. I hope it’s like I remember.

  • The Poisoned Lake

    At the bottom of the deepest ocean, there is a lake. Where dense, ultra-salty seawater sinks to the ocean floor, it forms a toxic pool of unfathomable depth, deadly to all but the hardiest of undersea life. Somehow, strange muscles, hundreds of years old, thrive on the banks of this mysterious lake. But most sea creatures brave or desperate enough to cross it meet their end in its murky depths. Eels venturing from the safety of their caves to hunt on the lake tie themselves in knots as the deadly toxins claim them. Shimmering silver fish twist and turn gently on the current, their embalmed bodies doomed to float upon the surface, washing up on the banks of the lake and adorning its shores for years to come.