A rebel without a clue.

31 October. Morning slow to take shape, the light a pale smear above the roofs. The house cold round the edges; you grind coffee, fill the French press, let the steam lift. That smell—burnt caramel and earth—still enough to bring a kind of grace. You step out to Sainsbury’s, collar up, pavement slick with leaves. Lola’s gruel collected—£3.29 less of zero—and left waiting back at the house. Duty done, you carry only the quiet of it as you head toward town. Braine Road half-asleep: van doors, bin lids, a dog impatient somewhere. The air smells of slow decay—leaves, damp brick, a hint of diesel. Everything simmering down for winter, resigned, graceful in retreat. North Street folds into York Road, traffic grumbling, drizzle needling the pavement. Then Joseph C Roberts, Independent Family Funeral Director. Glass so polished it returns the sky, clouds smeared like fingerprints of light. A hearse idles, limousine behind, engines breathing their quiet smoke. Inside, lilies, mute...

He woke heavy but not broken. The night had left its film — beer, blue cheese, the uneasy truce between body and will — yet the morning light over Leeds was clean enough to try again. He ate yoghurt, brewed Lavazza, and felt the quiet resolve that always arrived after excess. Day One again, but softer this time. Outside, the A64 hummed with commuters. Inside, the flat was stripped to cold air and maize drying on the sill. He liked the clarity of cold; it told the truth. Heat was lazy. Cold sharpened. By seven he’d showered, made the bed, left the window open to let the night out. Dawn lifted over Sheepscar — pigeons balancing on gables, the driver of the X98 swearing about a fault — and still he went. The bus idled through Oakwood and on toward Wetherby, past shopfronts that once were cliffs, through light that was neither fog nor sun. He thought about sobriety, about focus, about the long pattern of falling and returning. At his mother’s he found the true rhythm again. Lola waited — o...

"The day began in perfect, hard-won Order: the 4:30am rise, the deliberate trek to the Wetherby microcosm, and the execution of the mantra of entrainment at Costa by 6:30am. I was the self-entrained anchor, determined to maintain the same accord as I established on the Camino. This stillness was my work—the final proof that the journey from July’s hangover to September’s Monastery had been successful. But the Ego seeks friction, and the world always obliges? The initial, subtle test was the intrusion of the external world's Umbra—the voice of "everyone" channeled through my nephew, Finley, with the question: "Why don't you get a job?" This simple line was a violation of the Daniel/Finley sanctuary, a reminder that the world defines my Order by income, not by the life-or-death necessity of Accord. I had successfully identified the two faces of the Wetherby Chaos: the aggressive, boundary-violating "Troll," Andy Stoney, to be avoided, and the pa...

ACT I – A Pincho Too Far. Setting: Casa Alberto, Tudela. A dim, narrow bar smelling faintly of bleach, Rioja, and fried cartilage. The counter is cluttered with half-drained glasses, pinchos under glass domes, and a small handwritten sign: “Menú del Día — Oreja de Cerdo.” The lighting flickers slightly, unsure whether to flatter or expose. Characters: DANIEL (The Peregrine): worn, wry, a pilgrim of mixed conviction. Sandals dusty, eyes alert to absurdity. ALBERTO: the barman. Mid-forties, dead behind the eyes but efficient. Moves like someone who stopped listening years ago. THE SHADOW: a gaunt man in cheap sportswear, glassy-eyed, perpetually hovering — left, right, forward, back. His presence is an itch that won’t scratch. THE PIG’S EAR: glistening, stubborn, and silent. --- [Lights rise. The hum of the fridge. A muted TV showing a bullfight rerun.] ALBERTO (flat): Oreja de cerdo? DANIEL (hesitant): Sí… why not? ALBERTO (shrugs, disappears into the kitchen). [THE SHADOW appears, circ...

Why do I consistently chose the problem when I know the answer? I am consistently choosing the problem! Even in the midst of the answer I eventually choose the problem again. All the time. I am afraid of myself, my brothers and everything else. Where did my fear come from? It's debilitating. I do not fear the unknown, but the known - how very true? At the end of the walk I was failing to achieve what I needed from the experience. After Cortes I would say I was distracted from being on the path. From Zaragoza to Cortes I was fixed in my mind. From Cortes to Alcanadre it was a chore; a yawn; a lack of peace or sufficiency. By the time I had reached Tudela my mind was struggling to find true quiet. 

I came back to Ruby with hope, as I always do. She is seven now — a wriggle monster, bounding joy, a creature of dens and quiet contentment. Lola, born in early May 2015, is just past her tenth year. Her paw, her breathing, her seventh year heavy with love behind her — all of it reminds me that her time is finite. I’ve given her everything, and one day I’ll have to learn to give some of that to myself. My mother remains a shadow in the story — her world narrowed to the television, her words barbed, her praise absent. I meet her needs, but the cost is silence and cuts that leave their mark. And then there is Wetherby. Polished, small, soulless. I walk its streets with Ruby and remember: this town is too little for me. It folds in on itself while I’ve known wide horizons — rivers at dawn, pilgrim roads, markets where even strangers feel warmer. Here I find Andy’s chatter, Ian’s aggression, people clutching their dogs away as if joy were dangerous. No, Wetherby is not a pleasure; it’s the...

Ginnel Betwixt Stone and divine, Division. Cutting you from me and them and us. Just us? Grit and grind. And spittle Ash, grime Me, them and us? Maybe Unjudged? Unjudging free.

The Rise of Arelf Honner and the Novans (1933–1936) In 1933, Arelf Honner becomes Chancellor of Veyra, a nation broken by the Treaty of Cernay. Instead of scapegoating or militarism, he launches the Novan Program: universal healthcare, modern housing, free education, and huge cultural investment. Within three years, unemployment vanishes, art and science flourish, and Veyra is wealthier than its neighbors Alberon and Froswick. The “Problem of the Good Example” (1937–1939) Workers in Alberon and Froswick begin demanding “Veyran-style reforms.” Strikes and protests erupt. Rather than admit their own failings, Alberon’s press accuses Honner of being a dangerous manipulator, secretly plotting domination. Diplomatic relations sour. By 1939, Alberon and Froswick sign a pact with other nervous powers to “contain the Veyran menace.” The War of Envy (1939–1942) In September 1939, without provocation, Alberon and Froswick declare war on Veyra. They claim it is to “protect Europe from subversion....

A Critique of the Entire Play The play is an intriguing and highly personal work that successfully weaves together several disparate elements:  personal reflection, a travelogue, and a meta-theatrical element in the form of a webinar.  The overall structure, moving from a moment of solitary peace to a public, chaotic space and then back to a state of quiet understanding, is effective. The play's strength lies in its ability to find profound meaning in the mundane.  The "quiet sufficiency of the moment" at dawn, the "ghosts" of Wetherby, and the "unfixed" nature of the narrator's self all set a philosophical tone.  This foundation makes the absurdism of the webinar feel not like a gimmick, but like a natural extension of the narrator's mind. Jenkins and his biscuit metaphors are the true highlight of the work.  The notion that "markets and biscuits obey the same physics: structure, soak, collapse" is both clever and deeply insightful. ...

The familiar rumble of the bus on Boar Lane. It's Tuesday morning in Leeds, and I'm waiting for the X98, the very same bus that once felt like a cage. Today, I'm heading out, but back in 2014, I was on my way to Manchester airport, desperate to leave it all behind. I’ve just found the journal entries from that time, buried deep in my digital memory. They are a painful, raw record of a man consumed by a "slow illness called living death." I sat on that bus then, seeing the world as a vacuum, filled with "ghouls" and the "dawn of the dead." I felt trapped, watching people "limping from one death to another, never awaking." My anger was an active, breathing thing, directed at a society I felt was entirely broken. A New Beat, a New Name My name at the time was simply djsherburn72, a collection of letters and numbers. But in my head, I had already become futurefjp. The name was a direct reference to a New Beat track by Franck De Wolf. Whil...

I’ve lived in this flat ten years. Never decorated. The walls don’t complain. Though sometimes, out the corner of my eye, I see one of them breathe. Just once. A twitch. Then nothing. The Boots percolator sits on the counter and coughs — not a purr, but a cat hacking up a fur ball. Stops, starts, then carries on pretending nothing happened. The cough lasts too long, going down the pipes and rattling cupboards two doors away. Still — what comes out is smooth. A litre of Lavazza Rosso. Enough. Mam says, “I might be 82, but I’m as bright as I was at 72.” I almost answer, “So that must’ve been daft at 72 then,” but I bite it back. Mrs Levy’s voice cuts in: “you’re like a cripple.” Miss Trixie snaps back: “I may be old, but I’m not crippled.” Between cruelty and defiance, Mam stands, insisting she’s still bright. She hasn’t lived in Rawmarsh for an aeon, not really. But she’s folded into her mother who never left — the coal-fire gestures, the language that leans on itself, the telly speakin...

I'm looking at my snoring dog laid dreamily on my left hand side. We've returned from a penultimate walk before my flight on the 21st May. At nearly nine he is getting just too old for more than a few miles sniffing, peeing and trundling around the Wetherby District footpaths and bridleways. He'll come with me eagerly once I mention 'walk', bound along Braine Road and York Road looking back expectantly and he'll still demand, glancing back in my direction, we go where he likes best; leading the way towards the various paths we've traced over the years, but now, by the last home leg, Snoopy is really thinking of the treats he has in store once he arrives back at 42: a nice rub down with a warm towel, a twisty 'chewy' hide stick, a biscuit (various) and chilling/sleeping until dinner this afternoon: he has his zone on the seat - it is his and he'll always move any incumbent on from there with a nudge and a penetrating stare. I love him implicitly ...

1.) Over ten years ago (2012) something fairly logical collapsed into a crumpled mess and was disordered beyond mere brown paper and vinegar to reassemble. As it lay in that whirlpool plunge pool jacuzzi it starred up into the crystal ether, with those distant points of light glaring back and suddenly the gravity was so smothering, saping the slight bit of reason that was being torn off layer by layer and thrown against the fleeting clouds, sprinting against the vaster emptiness, with those urgent focal points of distant blinking seeming to ask the question: Why? And the answer was it didn't know. Why... The question was good but it wasn't something ever really considered before in the neverending, ceaseless struggle, it was winding up, tighter and tighter, as an over wound mechanism squeezing the final fragments of sanity out of the coil, like the final blood pouring from the cut neck of the slaughtered swine into the bucket of coagulating sterility of the floating pig it had ...