‘The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms.’ It was at some point during the first UK lockdown that I read The Machine Stops, a dystopian story published by E M Forster in 1909. In what was an…

The World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty and what it means for us This blog is about the future, and how it depends on us By 'us', I mean you, and me, and all other adults more or less in possession of their faculties. It's also a piece of reluctant activism…

I’ve never known much about Canada. Until recently its one appearance in my life took the form of a bear-like coat given to me by my mother, the fake fur she’d bought during a snowy winter in Montreal. That was all I knew about Canada: it was cold. Also big. …

This is an excerpt from a piece on Substack proposes a series of affirmations to recapture the joy and beauty of life in 2022. The Right to Company Gathering is as old as humanity itself. Ancient humans sat around the fire and as civilisation developed, the need to be with others persisted. I am…

Since the middle of 2020, I’ve been teaching English literature to Chinese teenagers in Australia. It’s strange, interesting work — a mixture of language, literature and cultural communication. My students are in their early teens, the children of first-generation immigrants to Melbourne and Sidney — very different from the British…

Since I first went to Druid Camp, a tiny esoteric festival held near the River Severn, early August has been a special time. Growing up in Gloucestershire, late summer had always felt special. But up until a decade ago I never had a name for it, much less a festival…

Five years ago, I couldn’t possibly have imagined I would be living in southern Europe, having accidentally emigrated to Portugal. On June 23rd 2016 I went, rather nonchalantly, to my local polling station to vote — there had been a lot of elections that year and the referendum, following just…

The photo above has a curious back-and-forth quality. It’s of me in Albania in 2019, a country I’d wanted to visit since hearing of the bizarrely isolated communist state in the late 1980s. I’m in a cafe which pays a kind of ironic homage to the country’s half-century of authoritarianism…