‘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…

Everybody’s doing it, but nobody’s talking about it … By ‘everybody’, I mean governments. By ‘nobody’, I mean the public. Around half the world’s governments are now looking into introducing a central bank digital currency or CBCD, a digital version of fiat money which would be issued and regulated by…

The summer-just-gone, while volunteering at a green festival, I attended a workshop on haybox cooking. I’d been carrying the image of a haybox — effectively a thermal stove which uses insulation to slow-cook contents that have been heated via hob or flame — in my mind’s eye since childhood, when…

This short video shows a vision of one of the futures, possibly the near-future, that could evolve out of where we are now. A young woman goes about her day with the help of her smartphone. It’s a bit like that drawing which changes according to how it’s viewed: a…

Everybody wanted action, but Nobody wanted to act. Anon Over the past two years my sense of belonging to a liberal democracy has fallen apart. Until then, I’d basked in a lifelong feeling of security that my ability to amble down a London street breathing God’s fresh air was my…

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…