A rebel without a clue.

He woke before the house did. The hour sat lightly on the rooms, the sort of hour that doesn’t announce itself. His mother slept. The Airbnb guest slept. The dog was not yet with him. He stood at the bay window and let the day arrive without interpretation. Roofs, a rinsed sky, the far-off hum of the motorway—movement everywhere, but not here. He noticed the difference. How motion could happen without arrival. How people could be in a place and not be there at all. Earlier in the week he’d watched men in lycra bolt uphill, talking as if tethered to an invisible machine. Healthy, yes—but absent. The body doing, the mind elsewhere. He felt the faint grief of it, not judgement, just the ache of contact missed. The hum of traffic before six came back to him. All that early movement to shift things from one container to another so other things could be had. He felt the sadness of it—the endless doing that keeps the machine upright and fear fed. He prayed quietly that peace would be allowed ...

I am mending. Slowly, without ceremony. The work isn’t loud or heroic; it’s a bath running, clothes drying on the rack, the small sound of order returning. Life doesn’t need to announce itself; it just starts breathing again through these ordinary acts. It’s sufficient. Outside, the morning gathers. School run, buses, the bolt of nine o’clock. I step into the flow and let it pass through me. The Umbra pulls its fractions together, the world tightening for another day. I keep walking. The scent of camphor drifts from an old coat on the bus — mothballs, the perfume of another age. It’s not unpleasant, just misplaced, a trousseau loosened into the present. The smell takes me back to  One Hundred Years of Solitude  — that same mingling of decay and grace, as if time itself had a fragrance. Márquez knew: everything returns, even the air. My father served, like his father before him. The empire’s long tail — Osnabrück, Malaya, Benghazi. He spoke little of it, only once about a crash...

(with Shakespeare’s ghost looking on) Greatness is not goodness. This ought to be obvious, and once stated plainly it usually is — yet modern politics repeatedly collapses the two, either moralising power or shrinking it into harmlessness. Tragedy never made this mistake. Shakespeare, in particular, understood that greatness is a matter of scale and consequence, not virtue, and that the body — frail, foolish, mortal — always waits beneath the robes. Tragedy asks a simple, brutal question: What happens when a human flaw is given enormous reach? In King Lear, Lear begins convinced that authority entitles him to love. He stages a performance of affection and mistakes words for truth. Power, here, destroys perception before it destroys anything else. The Fool — the only figure permitted to speak honestly — tells him bluntly: > “See better, Lear.” It is the play’s moral command. Lear cannot see while power cushions him. Only when stripped of crown, shelter, and dignity does knowledge arr...

I am returning happy.  I negotiated the airport in Alicante well. I didn't allow the change of pace, place, space, lack of solace challenge the final walk away of 2025. A chico had a jumper with a slogan writ large  *this is the best day ever* which I liked, but I'd change it slightly *these are the best moments ever* The Quiet Sufficiency of *all these* Moments. But the big *flog* of Ryanair is a different sort of *cabin pressure*. They say sit back and relax, but it's immensely difficult to turn off when the continue to force alcohol, perfume, food and scratch card purchases as soon as the cabin is climbing up to it's celling. 

I am tired.  I am in the air above France  And I have no idea Why I am above the clouds  And looking at a liminal  Edge retreating west When all I want is a hug. Embrace Spain for the duration Get into Alicante, Valencia! Cease the day in England  And arrive alongside the Mediterranean. I am tired. Coming down in the air above Iberia.

On a cold December Monday, Daniel stepped out into Leeds before dawn, carrying the weight of heavy Haix safety boots and the gentle intention of keepin’ his mind in wave-form rather than particle. The city was already showin’ signs of its Christmas irritability — influencers in the pubs, hipsters with their “sure” and “on trend” chatter, the usual ultraviolet glare of Um. He drifted through it all like a man refusing to be pulled down into noise. He had a bland Greggs croissant, he judged the hipsters, he escaped Whitelocks and the Victoria, and eventually he settled enough to board the X98 — the bus that’s as unpredictable as Leeds itself. As Red Hall slid past, he began easing into the day, remembering Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: waves are simply waves. He repeated the ACIM lesson for the day, letting forgiveness soften the edges. When he reached Wetherby, the air changed. Passing St Oswald’s and then the roundabout, he felt himself re-entering Hmm — his home frequency. At his mum’s, ...