PinnedMember-onlyThe Fragility of Democracy: an essay on our timesPart I: The lessons of authoritarianism Much have I travelled in the realms of authoritarianism. I’m the daughter of a man who was conscripted into the Austrian army at seventeen to fight for Hitler. Mercifully, my father was taken prisoner after a year and spent the rest of the war…Politics8 min readPolitics8 min read
PinnedMember-onlyThe Fragility of Democracy IV: Fear and hope‘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…Politics8 min readPolitics8 min read
Nov 25, 2022Member-onlyThe headlong rush to digital currencyEverybody’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…Digital4 min readDigital4 min read
Oct 22, 2022Member-onlySmall steps to resilience: cooking with a hayboxThe 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…Energy Efficiency3 min readEnergy Efficiency3 min read
Sep 23, 2022Member-onlyDigital dystopia or inevitable progress?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…Digital4 min readDigital4 min read
Jul 28, 2022Member-onlyIs democracy dying?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…Democracy4 min readDemocracy4 min read
May 24, 2022Member-onlyLessons learned?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…Covid-1910 min readCovid-1910 min read
Feb 14, 2022Member-onlyOn Canada: place, protest and perceptionsI’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. …Politics7 min readPolitics7 min read
Jan 1, 2022Member-onlyA Manifesto for Human Flourishing 2022This 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…Art7 min readArt7 min read
Nov 26, 2021Member-onlyA Note to my FollowersI’ve just published the first of what I’m calling The Bafflement Essays on Substack. It’s a series of pieces in which, drawing on my personal history, background in philosophy and knowledge of other countries, I try to make some sort of sense of these strange, fast-changing times. I still intend…1 min read1 min read
