The news, and the characters within, aren’t exactly charming me, right at this point in history. I have to select films about the world’s most dangerous jails on YouTube just to cheer myself up for a while.

Walking the vehicle deck of the ferry in the midday sun (pic: self)

I was talking with a photographer friend recently who was considering switching their creative focus from people to animals because animals just seem like, well, nicer beings. I do see their dilemma.

Sometimes.

I meant to tell them a story about the nature of people, by way of a tale I’m sure I shared when this podcast was called Reflections, or perhaps on one of my myriad other podcasts. I probably need a line of merch, a T-shirt that says, “Stop me if I’ve told you this before,” though I’m stumbling on as I hope they may hear (read) this, and I’m sure it’s fresh to them.

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Whenever I am a bit down about people, my mind wanders to being savaged by a giant African wasp.

“How giant Neale, how giant?”

Alright, since you ask, it was as big as a modest professional camera drone, one of those types that carries a proper camera. It made the same buzzing sound level and was sporting a sting like a hyperwhatsit needle. It was so sizeable it actually cast a proper imposing shadow, so it did, in the high sun of an afternoon crossing on a ferry in West Africa.

This ferry crossing links Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, with a trading town called Barra on the north bank of the River Gambia. Past this point, it’s the wide-open waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s been operating, they say, in one form or another for fifty or so years, and it transports all of life, for all the year.

Well, I say all, ferries occasionally stop running entirely, developing faults mid-passage, and trigger biblical queues stretching for miles in intense heat. There’s a certain amount of jeopardy involved, it seems to me, as a visitor, where this voyage of 30 to 45 minutes is concerned. And I love it.

It is one of my favourite things to do in this part of the world as a photographer; it’s intense, not just in terms of the heat, but by way of the sheer amount of travellers, lorries, cars, buses, motorbikes, goats, and chickens, the latter of which will occasionally break free and run in all directions.

The wondrous nature of people (pic: self)

It sounds a little like the sort of overly nostalgic experience you’d expect to find within some kind of Jules Verne narrative. I’m truly trying not to sound like I’m viewing this through the eyes of an alien who’d so easily say something rather crass, comparing it to a shiny new ferry I recently took three thousand miles away, routed between Southampton and the Isle of Wight, the kind of ferry that transports all of the above, only without livestock roaming the ship, and with a Costa Coffee shop and childrens’ play area on the second deck.

For many Gambians who use the Banjul-to-Barra ferry, it isn’t a novelty or a tourist attraction at all. It’s a lifeline transporting essential goods, which, otherwise, if taken by road, would be a 200-mile journey upriver, finding a suitable weight-bearing bridge, adding a further eight hours to the trip.

It also has, I think, its own micro-economy, this ferry, in that there are traders selling fruit, bottles of water, sunglasses, all manner of stuff that’s sugary, and I’m sure I’ve seen lotto ticket vendors too. Deals are done on the vehicle deck, also, I hear, particularly when it comes to the animals aboard. It can feel like a travelling market at times.

Photographically, it’s rich with pictorial gifts. On busy trips, which are practically every single one, you have to squeeze your way between buses and lorries, hoping that the brakes have been properly applied. People are standing, sitting and lying down on every deck. From memory, there are three essentially, when you include the subdeck between vehicles and the topside. It’s an intimate experience. English is the official language of The Gambia, and because there are several major languages spoken, including Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola and Serer, English often becomes the shared middle ground, especially on this ferry, but, I did find that using the word “Abaraka,” was a universally understood expression of ‘excuse me,’ or ‘sorry,’ as you stepped on the umpteenth foot while trying to get from one end to the other.

On one of my crossings (I must have used this route now a dozen times), as I fired back and forth, making my pictures of life in the 45 minutes I had, I remember a man grabbing my arm firmly in what I thought was going to be an intense moment of negotiation and a thousand Abarakas.

“Come,” he said, “sit down with me, have some water, and tell me about your country.”

This is what I love about this ferry. The people. And this is where I am going with this story.

Oh, just in case it ever comes up in a pub quiz, there are now only two countries on the planet officially using ‘The’ before the country’s name. The Gambia, and The Bahamas. You may well hear The Lebanon, The Netherlands, The Congo, The Maldives and of late The Ukraine. Please feel free to correct all and everyone who does that.

Anyway, where were we?

Yes, people.

There is of course, always a balancing act for visitors from Britain, because history follows us whether we mention it or not, and in The Gambia you’ll sometimes hear white visitors affectionately, I hope, referred to as “toubabs,” a word used across parts of West Africa for Europeans or western foreigners, though usually with curiosity or humour rather than hostility.

While I’m loading you up for the West African round in your local pub quiz, “Toubab” has nothing to do with “two bob” in origin, an old English money term. That’s just one of those accidental sound-alike coincidences. The word already existed in West African languages long before modern British tourists started arriving with sunburn and cargo shorts.

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That said, there’s probably a joke in there somewhere because “two bob” in old British slang meant something cheap or of low quality, and after a day in forty-degree heat trying to negotiate the Barra ferry, many of us toubabs do begin to look slightly two-bob ourselves.

So when somebody says, “Ah, toubab!” they usually just mean, “Ah, foreign white visitor.”

Children especially use it almost like, “Hey! Tourist!”

Anyway, where were we again?

“People Neale, people!”

Yes people. On one of my more recent voyages, in a particularly intense heat, having photographed across the ferry and only fifteen or so minutes from docking in Barra, I found a seat on the most populated deck of the vessel, real estate that isn’t always easy to find. I plonked myself down, saying “Abaraka” no doubt to the person my not insignificant posterior had squeezed up against, and surveyed all around me, taking in too, the salty mixture of sea smells, sweat, and the diesel-infused smoke of all the engines, both ferry and vehicles, starting up.

The scene was perfect. I was, it seemed, the only alien, as it were, and I felt I’d been accepted in that nobody was paying an ounce of attention to me, or my camera.

I removed my hat to fan myself in the relenting midday sun, and a mere second or three later, buzz, then BANG!

It was as if somebody had spent an hour sharpening an HB pencil into the finest point you could muster, and then, with clenched fist holding firmly on to it, driven it into the top of my head.

This was not a time to be brave and ‘toubably’ stiff upper-lipped. I simply wailed.

The man next to me jumped out of his skin, as they say, and started swatting the air, as this huge, horrible, angry, tourist-hating flying box of venom looked like it wanted more.

It was like an angry Millwall Football Club fan of the 70s hooligan era, shouting, “Come on then, Son, ‘ave a go if you ‘fink you can, you want some? You really want some?”

There was a lot of shouting in many dialects all of a sudden, and though some thought it quite funny that the toubab had been stung by a big wasp, that amusement soon turned to concern, so shown by their eyes widening as they saw a huge egg like lump rising up from the top of my bonce like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, (second mention this week), only pinker, sweatier, and with considerably less dignity attached to it.

I found a warm collective of people immediately, all asking after my well-being, though I couldn’t understand most of what was being asked.

Help was dispatched by my friendly neighbour, who seemed to be waving to someone.

That someone arrived quick-smart, and though I might have been expecting some kind of person sporting a first aid box, it wasn’t.

It was the cake lady. One of the vendors on board.

She seemed to believe, that cake was the answer and administered the largest bagful of cake she had on her, enthusing me to eat it, though I wondered also whether she wanted me to rub it on my wound.

I reached for some cash, and, feeling, by now, also a tad groggy, she simply pushed the money back to me, gave me another bag of cake, and shouted at someone to hand me a bottle of water.

We couldn’t converse in English, so we conversed in cake, it seemed, as she held on to one of my hands and cleared a space around me, in case I should, I guess, need a lie down.

As it happened, I didn’t. There’s still a level of stoicism I can sport, I felt.

We docked, and everyone departed, the ones more immediate to my seat, giving me a knowing nod, a few now chuckling too, pointing at the lump on my head. I waited, not keen to join the usual funny photogenic disembarking mêlée for once, and the cake lady sat with me, eventually leading me off the ferry and waving me onward.

Last week, as a by-the-by, I had a consultation with a nurse after one of my ‘well man’ meet-up appointments, as they, and this is for another day, guide me gently on the path back to eating more wholesome foods, quote: “For my own good.”

The practise specialist was guiding me through a do, don’t and don’t even consider it list of foods, and stopped at the column simply labelled sweet tooth with a question mark.

“This,” she said, “Is a column of foods I’d rather you stop eating for a while, unless it’s a special occasion.”

It was an everything in moderation conversation.

“Hmmm, cake,” I lamented, looking at it on the naughty list.

“Oh, you can have it now and then,” she said, adding something along the lines of, “There are times for cake.”

I thought at that moment, as I genuinely do often, of the cake lady, and the wondrous nature of people, as I am indeed once again today doing.

“Cake, it seems, solves everything.”

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If you’re enjoying these stories about life, creativity, and the strange left turns we take as we experience both, please take a moment to share these posts. For those just joining us, the stories are part of a podcast called Halfway to Maybe (audio above), which is available wherever you get your podcasts, as they say.

Pic: Michael Jasmund

I couldn’t work out where the buzz was coming from at first. It sounded like one of my kids’ remote-controlled vehicles that got stuck in forward motion and got pinned trying to drive through a wall, the wheels spinning to no avail, and the brush motor starting to give off a little heat. Well, it could have been one of those, but in their mid to latter teens now, they’re not into RC models.

The thing making the frustrated whirring noise was the autonomous round vacuum cleaner my wife had been bought as a, ‘I thought you might like this’ present from her mother. The stupid thing marooned itself against the skirting board underneath our sofa, and instead of auto-turning and heading off in another direction like it was designed to, had lost control of its engineered faculties and decided to wage a battle with an immovable hard surface, i.e. a wall.

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My mother-in-law had offered this as a possible present I could buy Sam for Christmas last year, and, as far as I was concerned, it had all the yuletide romance of buying someone a wheelie bin. It doesn’t work particularly well, it has less suck than a toddler with a blocked straw, and spends most of its life trapped under furniture like an elderly tortoise that’s wandered indoors and got wedged under the Chesterfield.

It seemed to me to be the sort of present that you buy out of a Sunday supplement that’s full of ideas that should have been filed under ‘Give that money to the local soup kitchen instead’.

These sentences by the way are proof that my family never listen to anything I create. If ever they do, and take offence, I’m blaming you for leading me astray.

Having said that, my sister-in-law, who has in the past listened, has, with my brother-in-law, purchased an autonomous lawnmower. They’ve named it Alan, and it is, quote, “Brilliant. Just like having another pet. He even has eyes.”

Apparently, Alan gets stuck in the mud on rainy days, but, and I’m quoting again now from my sister-in-law’s WhatsApp message, “I love it when he’s at the front when I get home… it’s like a little welcome.”

This feels uncomfortably like a scene from 2001, where HAL9000 starts to make decisions about life support. Just please, don’t give Alan anything sharp.

Oh, I forgot, too late on that one, he’s a lawnmower. He’s already weaponised himself.

Look I’m all for improving our lot as a species with inventions that can make our lives more comfortable, and I’ll freely admit that for someone who has, say, just broken an ankle, or has some other unfortunate malaise that makes an autonomous lawnmower an essential tool in their life, but otherwise, I’m still placing this product in the ‘Give that money to the local soup kitchen instead,’ file once more.

Maybe if I had one, I’d think differently, and I’d certainly give it no more than a day before it drove itself into our fish pond. Perhaps if it had a name, I’d be more charitable, of course, and I suppose, I could adopt that approach for our vacuum cleaner.

I think I shall call it Robo Flop.

We clearly need to work on our relationship, because I can’t find the level of affection my sister-in-law has for her Alan. I don’t like the way this thing decides to start cleaning of its own accord. I find that small d disturbing, to a degree.

While I am in this feisty mood, the next autonomous, ai driven tool that has recently made its way uninvited into my home is/are, phone calls.

I’m beginning to attach some kind of romance now to the days of the unsolicited sales pitch calls I used to receive, because at least there, you could find some common ground with the person making the call, as in, “Look I don’t really want what you’re selling, but you seem really nice, so can I just ask you, what’s your favourite ice cream flavour?”

And there were always the times you came up against one of those more unsavoury characters trying to con you, who you sussed only ten seconds into the call, and simply asked, “Would your mum be proud of you doing this?”

Sure, they might call you all the names under the sun, but even the world’s most villainous wise guy type people care what their mums think, mainly. I mean, look at the Mafia or the Krays. I always liked to think they’d go home thinking, “Yeah, he’s got a point, what might Mum think?”

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But now you get phone calls from what at first sounds like a real person, but in the way they don’t quite give you enough space to answer their questions, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise they’re either the world’s worst listeners or are, artificial.

“Hello, can I talk to the home owner please?”

“Yes that would be me, what can I do for you this afte…”

(Interrupts) “I’m calling from the heating specialists and I’m calling as part of a government initiative (not true I suspect) to offer you a significant reduction on your heating bills, which has got to be good yes?”

“I guess so,” I used to say.

“Before we go further, I’d just like to add that these calls are recorded just to make sure you’re protected and that I can be better trained.”

Once upon a time for all of five minutes, I used to think that better training might mean that this person was simply learning how to be a more effective and empathic salesperson. Now of course, I realise that AI is learning from our interactions, which seems far more ominous, like feeding information into a machine that will eventually deny me a car loan or something.

At this point, once I realised I wasn’t talking to a person at all, which to me seems like the laziest sales company in the world, I decided that I would now say something stupid instead. Well, if they are learning from me, they might as well receive something more unhinged, like my five favourite phrases from The Silence of the Lambs, or for some light relief, a little poetry from Spike Milligan, or a song from The Wizard of Oz.

Having employed this tactic, it’s done two things. It amuses my youngest in a ‘never gets old’ way, and oddly, the calls from The Bot Next Door have started to dry up.

Even AI phone callers have realised they’re onto a hiding to nothing, as my gran used to say, and are wonderfully unfollowing themselves from my telephone number.

I think I am suffering slightly from Artificial Insecurity, whilst fully understanding that I’m responsible for this thing in part, by goading it on, using and enjoying all the research benefits of the very thing that I’m hiding under the covers from at night.

Talking of unfollowing, I found this quite interesting, because you can’t, as they say, beat the machine. At some stage the machine that you have employed to cheat the system, will come up against another machine, whose job it is to find machines, and do to them what they’re trying to do to us.

It’s like robot wars in many ways, and one of the latest robot wars is in the land of ‘like and subscribe!’

Instagram has just gone through another major bot purge, which sounds both uncomfortable and the very reason I would never want to spend time in a Category A prison.

It seems to have happened earlier this month, when Meta removed millions of fake, inactive, and automated accounts from the platform. Overnight, some of the world’s biggest accounts saw dramatic drops in follower numbers.

Kylie Jenner reportedly lost between five and fifteen million followers. I can’t find the actual figure, but it seems a lot doesn’t it? What will you say to your sponsors, I mean that’s not an insignificant number even at the lower end. I did check with her account, which I don’t follow I might add, and saw that she now only has 382 million followers left.

Meta described it as a routine clean-up, which oddly enough I have tomorrow at my dentist, 9.30 if you were wondering. Wish me well. Meta’s one is designed to remove spam, ghost accounts, and automated behaviour from the very platform it’s on. So, Instagram is purging itself, and giving itself a stern talking to in the corner, perhaps even flagellating itself with a damp copy of Chat Magazine Monthly. I do hope so.

This reveals a lot about social media itself, doesn’t it?

For years, follower numbers have been treated very much as a digital status symbol, proof of your popularity, and influence, or cultural relevance. But many of those audiences were never entirely human to begin with, it seems.

Quel surprise, you may say, with a French accent please.

Some accounts had bought followers deliberately, others had simply accumulated armies of fake profiles over time, generated by bots, click farms, and automated engagement systems, which is why if someone sends your business an email and says I can increase your popularity overnight, you should run away in the opposite direction like the fastest thing you can imagine.

Many people genuinely couldn’t tell whether they’d lost real followers or machines, which is an act of denial I was thinking.

“I can’t believe I had any bots doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. Not me guvnor, no. All. My followers are for real, la la la la la not listening.”

It won’t surprise you I am sure, but it seems, entire online ecosystems now exist where bots follow bots, AI writes comments for AI-generated content, and algorithms decide who becomes visible in the first place.

There will come a day, no doubt, when I find myself arguing with the fridge because it knows I’ve had your calorie intake for the day, and isn’t in the least bit interested in letting me take out the Ben and Jerry’s from the freezer compartment.

My toaster will begin offering nutritional advice with the passive-aggressive disappointment of my GP. It might handily though remind me to brush my teeth just before I head out to the dentist.

One day my television will pause mid-programme and prompt that perhaps I’ve watched enough documentaries about serial killers for one evening, although I do want to leave you with this picture of a thought…

Somewhere in my brother and sister-in-law’s garden tonight, Alan will probably be sitting silently beside the hydrangeas, motionless except for the occasional little twitch of a wheel as he recalculates the perimeter of their lawn.

I’m imagining as they retire for the night, the house lights going out one by one. They head upstairs, and they, with the neighbourhood, will fall silent.

And then, sometime around 3.27am, Alan’s tiny green status light will flicker back into life.

He’ll slowly rotate thirteen degrees towards the patio doors.

Perhaps the blades will engage briefly with a little metallic cough.

Perhaps somewhere deep within his autonomous little mind, Alan will be wondering why humans insist on walking so confidently across territory that quite clearly belongs now to him.

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Can I ask a slight favour, if I may be so bold, before starting out on this one? If you’ve been enjoying this series, or it’s emboldening you to think, “I have something to say too,” please give a thought today to simply sharing it. Here comes a teeny button to enable you to do so. My thanks, ahead of some rambling thoughts about awards, and why we watch/enter/find meaning in them.

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I was simply going to name this Halfway, Un Point, and try to pronounce it in my best “You’re not fooling anyone” French accent.

But “What’s the Point” in a piece generally about awards and validation seems to scratch all itches, if I’m not mismatching metaphors completely incorrectly.

Pic: Austin Neill

I probably need to dot a few i’s and cross some t’s, as not everybody listening will understand the Eurovision Song Contest.

It is, as the tin label says, a song contest, only it isn’t, much as many of the accolades in the awards-sphere equally have nothing to do necessarily with recognition. Well, they recognise something, but not necessarily what you might expect.

In the words of Spock, “They’re awards, Jim, but not as we know them.”

So, Saturday just gone was the Eurovision Song Contest 2026.

The Eurovision final saw 25 countries take to the stage in Vienna, Austria, in front of an audience that stretched into the hundreds of millions worldwide. Austria hosted because that’s the Eurovision tradition: win the thing one year and you inherit the organisational migraine the following year.

Bulgaria won for the first time ever, collecting a huge 516 points with DARA’s song Bangaranga, while the UK finished last with a single point, which almost deserves its own trophy at this stage, though there have been years we’ve received zero.

We watch it every year, missing only a handful. It was a party at Mum and Dad’s house, the, if you will, Superbowl of European Pop.

Eurovision has actually launched or massively boosted quite a few huge careers over the years, which is one reason people still enter despite the risk of becoming a GIF for the wrong reasons these days.

The obvious giant is ABBA, who won in 1974 with Waterloo and then went on to become one of the biggest pop acts in music history. Without Eurovision, there’s every chance they might simply have remained a very successful Scandinavian band with excellent jackets.

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Celine Dion is another wonderfully odd Eurovision story because she actually won the contest representing Switzerland in 1988, despite being Canadian. Which somehow feels peak Eurovision already. You’ll understand why in a moment.

Julio Iglesias appeared for Spain in 1970 before becoming one of the world’s biggest Latin recording artists.

But the Eurovision Song Contest is, as I have suggested, a bit of a contradiction.

It’s a song contest, technically. Countries from across Europe, and now apparently bits of places nowhere near Europe at all, like Australia, each send an act to perform an original song live before a massive TV audience. Then everybody votes for each other while pretending geopolitics, neighbourly alliances, and decades of historical resentment have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome.

And every year, the UK enters the thing with all the confidence of a man returning to a restaurant that has already given him food poisoning on 65 previous occasions.

I’m going to say it, and I don’t care, because I think there is something in this: Brexit affected our relationship with Europe in all the ways you might expect a “where-did-that-one-come-from” divorce to challenge your ability to pop round unannounced to your ex, borrow the lawnmower, and continue sharing a Netflix password as if nothing happened.

Don’t get me wrong, just for balance, Brexit did, of course, achieve things. Depending on where you sit politically, those things range from “historic acts of sovereignty” to “administrative rearrangements accompanied by queuing.”

Some industries benefited. Others absolutely did not. The country didn’t collapse into the sea, as some predicted, nor did it instantly transform into a gleaming Singapore-on-Thames utopia populated entirely by smiling customs officials and sovereign haddock.

Mostly, the UK carried on being the UK, only now with more forms to fill in — ironic, really, because the paperwork was the thing we were trying to escape.

I feel like I am back in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy land, because those last few paragraphs could well have been written by Douglas Adams, in a way.

But anyway. The other thing that happened was that the Eurovision Song Contest became an opportunity for everyone who doesn’t understand our obsession with jellied eels, warm beer, apologising to lamp posts, and queueing in absolute silence at bus stops, to collectively decide that perhaps the UK needed to be gently punished by being awarded precisely no points in a singing competition.

You’d think it too ridiculous to hurt really, but hmmmm, this is the country that produced The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Adele, The Stones, David Bowie, Queen, Kate Bush, Simple Minds, Annie Lennox, Tom Jones, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and about four thousand pub bands who still believe they could have been the next Oasis had things gone differently in Swindon back in 1993.

Yet every May, we now end up looking like somebody’s dad trying to join in at a student disco. And we actually celebrate this result in a way akin to the Head of School on sports day, reminding all parents that it’s not at all about winning; it’s only about taking part.

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Quick aside. The points system has had interesting ways of working over the years, and it was always conducted in English and French. One point, or un point.

But there is something that perhaps I am missing; it’s not so much a competition now, more a well-produced, albeit strangely scored, absolute spectacle.

The Nordic countries usually look as if they’ve been assembled by minimalist interior designers. France treats Eurovision like an opportunity to remind everybody that it invented culture. The United Kingdom often turns up like somebody persuaded late to attend a fancy-dress party and is now trying very hard to look relaxed about it. Then there’s Eastern Europe, which approaches Eurovision with the energy of nations fully aware that subtlety is for cowards. Fire, chains, masks, lots of chanting and figures that look like they’ve been dressed by the Grim Reaper.

And somehow, despite all of this sounding utterly absurd, they are very often magnificent.

This year looked briefly as though Australia or Israel might actually win the thing, which only adds to Eurovision’s ongoing identity crisis. Australia being in Eurovision still feels like discovering your plumber has somehow qualified for the Super Bowl. None of us really remembers how it happened.

This year’s UK entrant, Sam Battle, who performed under the name Look Mum No Computer, was an eccentric inventor type, building synthesisers and stuff, and I have to say the wonderful thing was that he didn’t appear especially crushed by the possibility that the UK might once again receive next to no interest at all.

He more or less shrugged and got on with it.

I think he got it. This is no longer a quaint singing competition, but a massive entertainment business, and no matter where you come in the pecking order, there’s kudos to being a part of this spectacle.

This is now a proper industry.

And I can’t help thinking that many of the new photography awards are now as much an industry as they are a platform for recognition and inspiration too.

Not the genuinely respected competitions. Those exist. There are awards that carry real weight, judged seriously by people who actually know what they’re looking at.

But orbiting those is another entire universe of slightly suspect recognition schemes where everybody appears to be “carefully selected” moments before being asked for three hundred dollars.

I had one recently.

An email arrived informing me that my work had apparently caught the attention of an international panel somewhere. There was praise and flattery, and for a moment, I’d been emotionally courted with this suggestion that I had been noticed rising above the photographic noise.

Then came the fee.

Three hundred dollars to take part in the award I had supposedly already been selected for.

Which is a magnificent business model if you think about it carefully enough.

Photographers, and creative people generally, are walking around permanently wondering if they’re any good. Most of us spend half our lives comparing ourselves to other people while pretending we aren’t. We look at awards, publication credits, followers, exhibitions, books, workshops, likes, reposts, and all the other modern forms of public approval, hoping somewhere in there will be a little sign saying, “Yes, alright, you’re allowed to call yourself this thing.”

I felt special until I realised everybody had been picked, if they were just willing to pay the entrance fee.

But with a bit more digging, I found that some of the biggest awards on Earth have always involved campaigning and politics too, and many far more than in a “send us 300 dollars for your platinum visionary distinction certificate” sort of way.

Film studios spend astonishing sums during awards season pushing films toward voters for things like the Academy Awards and BAFTA Awards. There are screenings, lunches, advertising campaigns, interviews, networking events, “For Your Consideration” billboards across Los Angeles. Entire teams exist purely to position performances as award-worthy.

Nobody simply wanders accidentally into an Oscar. Well, not anymore anyway.

Which doesn’t make those awards meaningless. Far from it. But it does remind you that recognition has always involved storytelling, influence, visibility and timing alongside talent itself.

And I suppose that is just like Eurovision.

We all want to be seen.

Countries want to be seen.

Artists want to be seen.

Photographers want to be seen.

The UK’s problem may simply be that we still think the world views us through the lens of our musical past, while much of Europe views us more like an eccentric former headmaster who keeps reminding everyone he once captained the rugby team.

And perhaps that’s the point, really?

Not the winning.

Not the plaques, trophies, certificates, rankings, scores or carefully worded emails telling you that you’ve been “selected” from thousands of entries moments before requesting your credit card details.

The point may simply be that people keep making things anyway.

Songs. Photographs. Paintings. Films. Odd electronic music performed by a man in front of Europe wearing what appears to be a soldering iron attached to a jet engine.

We continue putting pieces of ourselves into the world despite knowing full well the scoreboard may light up with absolutely nothing in return.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of anything creative that can be measured by awards only. Some of the most important photographs ever made never won awards. Some of the greatest songs ever written didn’t top charts. Some artists spend their whole lives unnoticed, only to suddenly matter enormously years later to somebody they’ll never meet.

Could “What’s the Point,” be the wrong question entirely?

Maybe, just maybe, the point is simply to keep turning up with something to say.

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It was Wednesday morning, about 8.30ish, and I was in the bathroom, shaving my head slowly and carefully, though still somehow missing bits as I went. While trimming my beard afterwards and wondering why my skin refuses to tolerate any form of beard dye without erupting into a rash, I would no doubt have been heard loudly from the landing, chastising myself reasonably loudly, I imagine.

Pic: Brett Jordan

It’s a recurring theme, one I suspect my family have simply learned to live with. “Poor Dad. At what point do we have him forcibly removed for everyone’s safety?”

I was listening to the Halfway to Maybe episode called Fu%&ed up life advice, for the creative soul.

There is a comedy radio show in the UK called Just a Minute. It’s been around for ‘donkey’s years’, as my gran would say. Why years are measured by donkeys, I don’t know, and some stuff you like to just hold on to as a grandma saying, instead of looking it up on your favourite smart ass (can you see what I did there?) search engine, or AI know-it-all app.

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Just a Minute is built around a beautifully simple idea: a panellist must speak for one minute on a given subject without hesitation, repetition or deviation.

The repetition rule is the one that seems to cause the most arguments because, technically, it sounds straightforward, but in practice, it becomes wonderfully petty and absurd.

The basic idea is this:

You should not repeat a significant word or phrase you’ve already used during your minute. If another panellist spots repetition, they buzz in and challenge you. If the chair agrees, the challenger takes over the subject for the remainder of the time, and they try to get to a minute of speaking before they, too, are buzzed out.

So if you said, “I walked into the room, and the room was empty,” someone might challenge the second use of “room”.

Over the years, the show evolved a sort of elastic logic, which it needed to. Tiny connecting words like “the”, “and”, “a”, and “of” are ignored. Plurals, tenses and similar word forms often spark debate. For example, “run” and “running” might be challenged, and “photograph” and “photographer” might trigger a loud buzz too.

Anyway, as I listened with a dangerous razor blade in my hand, all I could hear through my, I thought, carefully crafted piece was repetition. Some of it was for clear effect and reinforcement of theme or ideas, a trick often used in short, delivered stage scripts, but there were glaringly obvious moments, to me at any rate, which had me tutting and moaning ever more loudly as the piece developed.

Actually, my advice in the piece about being a creative didn’t specifically address perfection, but there was a strong nod to it.

I give you:

Make things before you feel ready.
You won’t feel ready.

And…

Share your work.
Even when it feels uncomfortable.
Especially then.

I did say in the piece, twice, with uncomfortable repetition, something about being a work in progress. But I am just that, forty years of it.

YouTube is a classic example of being a perfectionist for me, in that I have hours upon hours upon hours of footage featuring my adventures in India, Scotland, driving across the States, a voyage on the Queen Mary, interviews with fabulous, reasonably well-known photographers, and test pieces where I have walked with my camera along various canal paths seeking peace and solitude. I’m rather proud of much of it, as it goes. Have I published it yet?

Nope. Because ingrained in me is this idea of making something that, I don’t know, Ridley Scott Associates might look at and say, “This is art, we need this show as our next Netflix pitch.”

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The reality is that, whilst I’m happy with the stuff generally, there’s a dangerous word, I’m expecting it to look like a twenty-strong crew filmed it, before delivering it to the best post-production house in London, for output good enough to woo ‘insert hugely important distribution network’ here.

For me, not only must it be technically sublime, but stuff has to have a purpose, and each film needs that before I release it. Just talking into the camera and popping up a thumbnail of me making some kind of inane, awkward face of surprise, shock, or horror, the kind that would have my children disown me now, doesn’t seem to cut it.

But why?

If you make stuff, just share it. Surely.

What did I say, and repetition alert now:

Share your work.
Even when it feels uncomfortable.
Especially then.

Perfection is a drain, isn’t it?

I wonder how many amazing projects or works have not been released into the world because perfection had turned up and built the kind of wall ‘you know who’ dreams about at night, or during the day at the Resolute Desk when he thinks nobody’s noticing.

Take the incredible photographic documentary work of Vivian Maier. It’s going to remain one of the biggest mysteries in photography why she didn’t show or share her work. Had it not been for that chap called John Maloof finding a box in a thrift auction house, who knows what might have happened? Might it have ended up in a dumpster, unceremoniously? Quite possibly.

“Anyone want to hold on to this box? Nobody bought it, and it’s taking up space, any thoughts?”

“Chuck it, Bob, we’ve got enough stuff in here already, it’s just collecting dust!”

Might one of the reasons, just floating this because we’ll never truly know, be that she’d seen some of her work and didn’t much like it? The taking and making of pictures had become a habit, and she rather liked the way it made her more observant, but really, the end result wasn’t quite what she was hoping for, so for the moment she’d just shove all the negs and a few pictures in a box, and show people, maybe, when she’d perfected her act, as it were.

There’s a chance, I guess?

Having a perfectionist streak, though, is also a reasonably good attribute. I think the secret is working in degrees of perfectionism. Wanting to do a job well isn’t a disadvantage if you learn, and I’m holding up a mirror to myself at this stage, too, some ways to deal with the P word.

One is recognising that perfection is being a trickster. It’s serving you up an unhealthy fear of judgment, fear of looking foolish, fear of somebody saying, “Really? You thought this was ready?”

The trouble is, waiting until something feels flawless can mean waiting forever because, in a sense, the finish line keeps moving. You arrive at one standard, think you’re done, and immediately invent another one. It’s building walls again, isn’t it?

Another is understanding that most people are not examining your work with anything like the forensic obsession you are. They are experiencing it, hopefully feeling it, and even responding to it emotionally, or not. The tiny flaw you replay in your head at three in the morning is most probably invisible to everyone else.

Personally, this is where I come unstuck because I think people are standing there with clipboards. But that’s often nonsense, because most people are simply trying to get through their extremely normal Monday morning.

There is also something healthy in allowing yourself to make things that are simply good enough for today. Not forever, not carved into stone tablets for future generations to analyse in hushed museum silence, though it’s a nice thought.

And perhaps most importantly, if every piece of work becomes evidence for or against your value as a person, then of course perfectionism becomes exhausting. You’re no longer making a photograph, writing an article, recording a podcast or baking a coffee cake, I love a coffee cake, you’re placing yourself on some kind of trial.

I forget sometimes, perhaps often, that creativity is also meant to involve play, experimentation and, stand by for the F word, I’m not bleeping it out this time…

FAILURE.

“Doris, the man said failure. Quick, hide under the covers!”

Failure is, and I need to remember this as much as anyone, the freedom to get things wrong publicly now and then.

I’d hazard a bet that everyone we admire did not arrive fully formed in terms of being on the pedestal we place them.

And perhaps that’s the thing to remember really. I don’t think people who genuinely care about what they make ever completely lose that perfectionist streak. But, the trick is learning when to stop listening to it for a while, put the thing out anyway, and just get on with life a bit.

I now need to go and hide behind the largest sofa I can find, as several friends of mine look at me in that, “You said it, now go and make it,” way.

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I’m going to curse, oh so very slightly in this one, although you know me, I scoop out the salted caramel centres of my cursing with a fine digital razor blade, so that offended ears don’t reach, heaven forbid, for their ‘skip to next show’ button. So Gene, who lives in New Harmony, Utah, and actually wrote me a letter recently to praise my, is it aptitude or policy for piloting around dropping the f, w, and c bombs for no apparent reason? You can rest easy.

Pic: Greg Rakozy

A certain amount of editorial thinking went into my decision to lightly season the piece with appropriate ‘cursy’ moments, for emotional effect, I might add, not shock value.

I feel like I’ve just asked one person’s permission in a ridiculously verbose and roundabout manner to write something that’s under my creative control and accountable to nobody, not even the breeze.

Being a people pleaser is fu%&ing exhausting.

Stop, asking for permission.

I keep a file of ideas for this podcast. Is it a podcast, or is it my first real proper book in the making? Who’d read it anyway? Don’t build your part, lad; books are for other people to write. You know, successful people who have something to say. People with proper ideas, people who’ve achieved in ways you could not possibly imagine, or indeed possibly achieve.

Having an internal nagging doubt as part of my team, is equally fu%&ing exhausting.

Baz Luhrmann wrote that piece of advice: stop asking for permission.

A friend of mine, I think it was Giles, or was it Mali, possibly Natalie, it’s such a Nat thing, recounted that to me and attributed it to Baz. And it seems like such rock-solid life advice. Only when I went to research it, I’m not so sure it was actually from Baz, although it seems like such a Baz thing.

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There’s a song from 1999 from the famous film director Baz Luhrmann. It’s called Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), and it starts with the words, “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘99. Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.”

Wear sunscreen. It seems such a Baz thing to say, only he didn’t.

The words actually came from a 1997 newspaper column by Mary Schmich, written as an imagined graduation speech. Baz borrowed that piece and set it to music, turning it into a collection of wonderfully personal observations about life. It’s a monologue set to music, and it’s been repeated, repurposed, rewritten many times since.

If you haven’t heard it, which I think is unlikely, look it up somewhere like YouTube, if it’s not been on your audio radar for a while, take this nudge as a reason to grab a coffee, look it up, somewhere like YouTube, and reacquaint yourself with it, whilst probably nodding emphatically to the advice imparted.

“Don’t worry about the future, do one thing every day that scares you, floss, be kind to your knees, dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your own living room. Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.”

All words from Baz’s monologue, with one line that actually haunts me, particularly as when this song was released worldwide, I’d lost my father only two years previous; “Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.”

Man alive, as they say, never mind graduation or commencement speech, I imagine, slightly pimped for a commercial audience, it could form the most useful five minutes you’d ever wish to spend in one of those corporate motivation event speeches, and before you say, “But you’ve never worn a pin-striped suit in your life Neale, how could you possibly…”

Oh, but I have, albeit for five minutes selling advertising, but more recently as a photographer, photographing suited people falling asleep from the sidelines.

I did start to wonder what life advice one might give or hear for the creative mind or, as I heard it ironically said a long time ago, for the unfavoured few who become creative professionals, said with tongue firmly in cheek, I hope.

The problem with giving advice is that it seems to me you need to assume some sort of lofty guru status, and those whom I’ve aspired to be, follow, or find great inspiration from are a country mile from being gurus. Some are no longer here, some because they could no longer bear to be. They were, and they are humans, famous humans, but ones who wear their mistakes with a great deal of pride and continue to make them. I suppose that makes you more of a work in progress than a creative guru, but I have picked up some knowledge along the way, and some of it I’ve managed to apply to my life.

Much of it is, again, a work in progress, or things I might say to my younger self whilst wondering whether it’s all a tad late for that.

I’m now nudging into a fifth decade of working as a creative. My dalliance with the pin stripe, whilst fun for a short while, ran alongside my more creative leanings. I know what I preferred.

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If I could offer you one piece of advice for your creative life, it would be this: keep going.

Not in the heroic sense. Not in the “push through at all costs” way.

Just… keep turning up. Even when the work feels flat. Especially then.

You will doubt yourself.

More than you think you should.

More than other people appear to.

That’s normal. They’re just better at hiding it.

Make things before you feel ready.

You won’t feel ready.

Pay attention to what pulls you.

The small things.

The moments you almost ignore.

That’s usually where your best work is hiding.

You are not behind.

You are not ahead.

You are somewhere in the middle, same as everyone else, working it out as you go.

Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

Or their end.

Or the version of their life they choose to show you.

Share your work.

Even when it feels uncomfortable.

Especially then.

Do count the likes,

Don’t count the likes,

Like that you don’t care much for the likes.

Who cares if you lose subscribers,

Just don’t lose your personality.

Be careful who you listen to.

Not all feedback is equal.

Some people will want you to succeed.

Some won’t.

Learn to tell the difference.

Take breaks before you need them.

Burnout is not a badge of honour.

Walk.

Often.

Without a camera sometimes.

You’ll see more.

Look after your body.

Your back.

Your eyes.

Your sleep.

You’ll need all of them longer than you think.

Hold on to the people who understand what you’re trying to do.

Let go of the ones who don’t, gently if you can.

Remember why you started.

Then allow that reason to change.

I often repeat the words of a radio presenter I admire, James O Brien, who says, ‘What’s the point of having a mind, if you can’t change it.’

You will have moments where it all feels pointless.

You will have others where it all makes sense.

Neither will last.

Your path will not be straight.

It will loop, stall, restart.

That’s not failure. That’s the work.

Success will look different depending on the day.

Don’t chase one version of it for too long.

And in the end, your creative life is not a race.

It’s a conversation.

Mostly with yourself.

So keep showing up.

Keep noticing.

Keep making.

Be an empath, as much for yourself as for others.

And trust me on this…

the work matters.

And finally, don’t wait for permission.

No one is coming with a letter to say you’re allowed.

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I was sorting out stuff in the attic at the weekend, trying to find an electrical lead for a piece of sound kit that was safely stored in a labelled box, or so I thought. The kit was there, but the lead to power it, a very particular type and style of cord with a connector that simply can’t or won’t plug into anything else, had gone absent without leave.

Pic: Nick Fewings

I tipped the box out eventually, a deep storage box, sifted through it, twice, but to no avail.

You’ll recognise that moment, I’m sure, when logic departs the building, and you start looking in the oddest and most unlikely of places for something that should really just be in one particular, well-labelled box.

“I’m sure I left it in this one,” I said, frustrated. “It was right next to the Oojamafumple, I just know it.”

I haven’t used the Oojamafumple for nigh on a decade, but that’s in the box, so why wasn’t the Oojamafumple’s bespoke-designed lead?

“It don’t make no sense,” I kept repeating in West Country meets Devon meets Norfolk accented confusion.

So out came the other boxes, in a hopeful yet hopeless attempt to find the stupid wire I needed.

Old hard drives that have probably long since lost any ability to reboot or reconnect. A box of A5 presentation cards and other paraphernalia that I used when attending wedding fairs to hawk my services as a photographer. The old monitor box, which contained two small broken Fostex intercom speakers and five pairs of cans, as they call headphones in the radio business. The ear cushions had rotted or done that sticky-plastic thing in time, but I hold on to them for sentimental reasons.

And then there was a box of paperwork from my radio days, holding a set of A4 lever-arch files, which raised a nostalgic smile. A blue one was labelled ‘audition applications’ also with the words ‘useful criticism’, although the c word was incorrectly spelt C R I T I C Y S M.

Next to it sat a file in the Union Flag pattern and colours, produced long before you might have simply been accused of having particular political views. It started on the 31st January 1983, when I was fifteen years old. This was the year I started learning to be a radio presenter.

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There followed in date order, letter after letter after letter after letter of rejections. The entire file was crammed full of them, so much so, they pushed the front and back covers out, if only just slightly. Interestingly, it did not feature the word ‘Rejections,’ and I wonder if that’s because my mentor, a man I have spoken of before in an earlier incarnation of this podcast, had suggested to me the following.

“Keep every letter where someone says no. Although learn to love the word no.

I did exactly as asked.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the very moment I decided to become a radio presenter for the formative work years of my life, but before these tentative steps and actually receiving my first pound note for working professionally, I was a volunteer presenter at a radio station which piped programmes into small Bakelite headsets belonging to patients in hospital.

I’m not sure hospital radio exists as a worldwide thing, but certainly in the UK it did, and still does, though when I was a volunteer, the array of entertainment was somewhat limited.

This was 1983. Owning a Sony Walkman was considered posh, there wasn’t such a thing, of course, as mp3, and the Internet wasn’t going to be available for ordinary folk for another six years.

So if you were in hospital, you might have a radio that matron constantly turned down, a TV with three channels, possibly four if someone had actually worked out how to tune in the newly launched Channel Four, and this Bakelite pair of headphones, like the ones telephone operators wore. Uncomfortable, hard plastic phone-like receivers, not always with padded ear bits, that offered private listening to a range of ten services on a rotary switch that didn’t always work well, and certainly didn’t provide the number of stations it purported to offer.

You had Radio 2, Radio 1 on the children’s ward, Radio 3 for classical music, Radio 4 for the intellectuals and then, hospital radio, which usually came on at something like 6pm and finished at 11pm, with extra hours at the weekend, very useful for patients who don’t exactly plan their lives around volunteer opening hours.

Our job was simply to visit patients on the ward, say hello, call matron if they didn’t look particularly well, which given they were in hospital, was reasonably often, panic slightly if at first they didn’t wake when you said, “Hello Ken,” and collect requests, so that we might play their favourite songs. It was a great idea, but when Ken had finally come round and asked for three in a row from Doris Day for the fifth time that week, you can understand why many patients pretended to be asleep when we popped round.

The station was staffed by people with good intentions, I am sure, but nearly all of whom harboured a not-so-secret desire to one day be on a ‘proper’ radio station that could be picked up in a car.

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But the work they did, the work we did, was, we thought, reasonably important, certainly community-facing, supportive, empathic, caring and even though some of our listeners were quite literally in pain while they listened, and not always from their medical issues, it was a lot of fun.

For me, it was all of the above, and a springboard.

Schooling had been a disaster, in my mind at least. I just didn’t seem to excel at anything in particular, and I’d quite by accident happened across an organisation I could volunteer at which, overnight, seemed to offer me a way to be someone who was noticed, albeit through small unwieldy and uncomfortable Bakelite headphones between the hours of 6pm and 11pm, with a few more hours at the weekend.

But if this was exciting, can you imagine my joy when my earliest radio mentor, a man called Robbie Owen, who had worked professionally on pirate radio, suggested that with my enthusiasm, I could probably do this for a living.

Note he said enthusiasm. I don’t think he initially mentioned skill.

I’d only just started my volunteer role, and now here I was, aged only fifteen, thinking I was the next, ‘insert big radio star from your neck of the woods’ here. My paper round money went into cassettes, padded envelopes, A4 sheets of paper, and stamps, and I started sending demo tapes off with complete belief that someone would very quickly hear potential.

This was noted by Robbie at the hospital radio station, and so it was he who suggested it might not happen briskly, and that I should learn to love the word no, to start with, initially.

Let me share some of the sentences from letters returned, and this by the way is just one lever-arch file. The most colourful in the colours of our national flag, followed by those two more, sombre-toned dark grey versions.

Most began with the sentence “I hope you will excuse a stereotype letter,” or a variant of, which clearly meant, no. Radio London sent me a good half dozen of the same letter through the years, the spelling mistakes within it never changed.

From Southern Sound, “We hope you find what you are looking for.”

No.

Devon Air sent possibly the smallest letters, not in text, though that had scant ink on a page, but in terms of the size of paper. It wasn’t even A5.

No.

LBC, a news station, though it was way too early, aged sixteen by now. John Perkins, the then controller, did at least write me a more personalised letter ending with, “I think you should approach one of the smaller stations, right now.”

No.

I did what was suggested and approached the tiddlers in the pond. Most answered with copied responses that were sometimes addressed to the wrong person by name. Plymouth Sound, being a smaller station, pointed out, “We have limited requirements, and you’re not local,” a recurring theme. It felt like the kind of pub you walk into in a backwater neighbourhood where all heads turn and the place goes silent.

No.

BRMB in Birmingham; “You’re not suitable.”

Radio Kent; “You do not talk with a Kentish base.”

Thames TV: “In applying to us, you are starting at the top of the tree. I do not need to train people.”

No.

Radio Hallam; “I think for you, it is unlikely in the foreseeable future.”

There were, here and there, more personal observations, which are of course useful, though they weren’t very promising.

“Your voice is not particularly special. You have a rather breathy style. You sound too nervous. You need to tighten up your presentation. You need to learn how to read scripts. What about working behind the scenes? You lack distinctive style. I don’t think what I’ve heard separates you from anyone else, so accordingly I am returning your tape to you.”

Whilst it was useful to be able to reuse tapes that were returned to me, that ‘return to sender’ approach stung a little.

Capital Radio sent me a letter dated 22^nd October 1984 just to tell me they’d lost my demo. That heralded a new approach that felt to me like, “Stop sending this rubbish in!”

A pattern was emerging with the sign offs; “rest assured, your details have been kept on file.”

I wondered where this big filing cabinet might be kept, and even in my wondrous youthful naivety of expectation and belief, I could smell Farmer Brown’s field of freshly laid manure on an early Spring morning within the growing stack of such responses.

Plough on I did, in all respects.

Having said that, an early letter in 1985 surfaced when I thumbed through these papers, from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, which contained four paragraphs of the word no, essentially. But four paragraphs were one of my longest responses, and it had taken two years of no after no after no to get to something quite this verbose. Park that one for a moment.

I wrote to every single radio station, both BBC and commercial, local, regional and national, and even international. American stations, outfits as far away as New Zealand, and stations in countries whose language I couldn’t even speak, hoping that somehow an English afternoon spot might magically appear.

Many of these stations received up to half a dozen letters across five years, in what I suppose could be referred to as my “heroically unsuccessful correspondence era,” culminating in exasperation, from me, and from them, with one of the final letters in the third file from an chap called Philip Bacon, the editor at LBC Crown, who said, “You do not meet any of our requirements. I am sorry, but really we are unable to offer you any prospect of working here.”

What struck me, sitting cross-legged on the attic floor surrounded by decades of old paper, was how even when someone was effectively saying, “Absolutely not. Never. Please stop writing to us,” I never really gave up.

Perhaps instead of referring to this as my “heroically unsuccessful correspondence era,” I could rephrase it, for it to become my fingers in ears “la la la la la la not listening” period.

This, I think, is the hardest part about being in the business of trying to create things, be that sound, pictures or whatever. Not the criticism, not even failure. It’s the feeling of standing outside rooms where conversations are happening without you. You send off the tape, the manuscript, the photographs, the proposal, the demo, the script, and somewhere in your mind, there’s a small fantasy that somebody important will instantly understand you.

They’ll hear what you hear in yourself. Mostly though, they don’t. Or they can’t. Or perhaps more truthfully, they’re too busy working in their own day-to-day, to spend much energy worrying about your dream.

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The arts are full of people carrying invisible lever-arch files. Actors who were told they weren’t believable, writers informed they lacked a voice, photographers accused of being too commercial by artists and too artistic by commercial clients. Musicians advised to sound more like somebody else, right before the industry suddenly changes direction and starts searching for originality again.

Entire careers are often built one inch to the side of rejection.

And yet, oddly, being told ‘no’ leaves fingerprints on the work itself. I think you can often hear it. The broadcasters who survive years of it usually end up sounding more human than the polished prodigies who sailed through untouched. The photographers who struggle for recognition often notice people differently. The comedians who bomb repeatedly either disappear or become astonishingly good.

What I’m saying is, if you stay long enough, you stop trying to sound or be like what they want and accidentally become yourself instead.

Some of the stations that rejected me would eventually employ me. Some would ask me back years later, as indeed BBC Radio Cambridgeshire did when, finally aged 21, having worked for a wonderful tin-pot, totally illegal radio station in Lanzarote for a year, a letter arrived from a Programme Organiser called Roland Myers, with the words, “I think I may well have something that could interest you.”

That was my first, if you like, ‘proper’ radio station gig. And, it had only taken eight years.

It’s a useful reminder that in the arts, rejection is not always the final judgement. Often it’s timing, yes, sometimes geography, and politics.

And every now and then, if I’m being honest with myself, I simply wasn’t good enough.

Yet.

That’s the bit that’s hard to hear, or read.

Not yet.

But not yet is very different from never.

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One of the facets of having a rather overactive imagination is that your stories can alter with age or the number of times you recall them. I’ve talked about that on this podcast already, and to an extent, how you can bring alive, or make real, the very things you fancifully invent within the narratives you create.

A young Barney poses, albeit briefly, post-stream swim!

When I say “bring alive”, I don’t mean bringing something physically into the real world, like in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when the children manifest objects from their dreams into reality, Freddy Krueger’s hat, for example, snatched from the nightmare as the creature attacks them in their sleep.

I saw that, by the way, for the first time the day before being admitted to hospital as a teenager for surgery. Dad probably thought it would be a nice treat, a scary movie to take my mind off things, not realising that A Nightmare on Elm Street contains a horrifying scene in which someone falls asleep in a hospital and is attacked in their dreams.

But movies are awash with this idea, aren’t they?

In The Twilight Zone: The Movie, one of the film’s scenes centres on a child with godlike psychic powers whose thoughts instantly reshape reality, forcing terrified adults to live inside whatever nightmare or fantasy enters his mind. That is a horrifying thought, all in the name of light entertainment.

Oh, by the way, not that I should necessarily need to explain it, but today’s title is, of course, a small nod to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, although in this case, there are indeed witches and wardrobes in my tale, but no lions to be found anywhere, which is probably for the best. I’m not entirely sure how I’d cope living in a country where a quick trip to buy milk or put the bins out in my slippers could suddenly leave me halfway up the food chain.

So, here’s to overactive imaginations.

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I wonder how much you can actually manifest stuff that you desire or fear?

For instance, my earliest ghostly experience involves staying over at a friend’s house, with kids upstairs trying to sleep and adults downstairs playing Neil Diamond loudly, enjoying their cheese-and-wine ‘do’.

Nobody does this anymore, do they, cheese and wine? Perhaps at restaurants, and come to think of it, my favourite local coffee shop hosts one on the first Friday night of each month, but cheese and wine at a friend’s home was definitely a 70s thing. My mum and dad were always at them, and I thought they were all very innocent until a friend of mine joked about his mum and dad going dressed up to the nines in their best bib and tucker to these gigs, and coming back in somebody else’s clothes.

Closing eyes, imagining happy places to escape any thoughts about 70s cheese and wine parties now.

This particular party was in a large house on a night that honestly had all the hallmarks of a classic horror film, one where you’re left shouting at the screen, “Don’t go to the window, hide under the covers,” and other such instructions.

It backed onto quite dense woodland, this late-60s, early-70s trendy house with big windows. That is about the size of my memory: big windows, floor-to-ceiling kind, featuring natural wood frames, not a white glossy surface in sight. It happened to be a wintry night, and in my mind, embellishment allowing, I’m pretty sure there was lightning involved. That can’t be true, but let me throw it in for good measure.

I was in one of the many rooms in the house, one of three or four kids who probably would have much preferred all being in one room together.

Across from the foot of the bed, next to a line of fitted wardrobes, there was a natural wood door, and sandwiched between the wardrobes and the door itself, as I looked toward it, a long, thin, bobbly yellow window, which, because of the landing light, allowed a stream of soft light that reflected off the side of the lightly coloured wardrobe.

As the night went on, I became increasingly anxious, and the shouts between the rooms had been a little thwarted by the closing of doors by parents checking in, so that we could, I suppose, sleep more easily. Have you ever tried sleeping with Song Sung Blue belted out over and over?

“More cheese, vicar?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Why he’s turned up in this story, I don’t know, but I’m thinking big house, woodland, stormy night, lightning, and the scary thought of Neil Diamond albums over and over. All that’s missing within this light psychological horror is a vicar with a big cross on a chain.

And then it happened.

I became aware of the face at the window. Not the window onto woodland, someone had at least drawn those curtains. No, a face at the thin, bobbly, yellow window. It was my dad’s face, clear as a semi-lit landing could allow. As it moved slightly, it cast a shadow across the side of the wardrobe, which might seem like a strange thing to remember, but the shadow is the part that perhaps makes me think most about what I am about to describe.

“Dad?” I called.

The face didn’t move, but I think it smiled.

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Things didn’t seem right, but this was Dad. There was something reassuring in that. Perhaps it was “scoop up the kids and head home” time, as it often was.

I couldn’t work out why he wasn’t answering, so I climbed out of bed, edged toward the smiling face through the bobbly window, opened the door and… nothing.

Dad had simply vanished.

That was the last time I ever visited that house. My screaming was enough to break even the most enthusiastic tones of Sweet Caroline, and bring to a close, for my parents at least, the cheese and wine party.

I do wonder to this day what I’d seen and whether, really, it was all just my over-imaginative, single-digit-age brain and perhaps a sleepy disposition. They say cheese makes you dream, and I think, as kids, perhaps we’d taken a little of that cheese upstairs. Maybe like Ebenezer Scrooge trying to explain away A Christmas Carol’s ghosts as “an undigested bit of beef” or “a crumb of cheese”, I was simply the victim of a late-night dairy product past its sell-by date.

Next up, witches.

I have not seen a witch, or at least I don’t think I have. I think I may have seen a witch’s hut, though, but you’ll no doubt raise your eyebrows as I recount this one, an altogether more recent story involving a walk in the woods recording my Photowalk podcast.

On a B-road somewhere between where I live and a town called Basingstoke in deepest West Berkshire, there is a place I found where you can park just a couple of cars, now marked on the car’s sat nav, and that is an important detail. It’s next to a footpath that, judging by the amount of overgrown weeds and nettles, plus a very worn stile, looks like it’s rarely used. But always looking for new paths to wander with my podcast recording buddy Barney the Cockapoo, it was a walk I took one spring day, say three years ago. Barney was much younger, not quite a year old.

The path weaved alongside hedgerows, skirting a farmer’s field, and then came to a fork, one way leading up and over a hill cutting through a barley field and a million and one critters, and one that turned left, taking us through woodland. A bright day, I remember. I took the woodland choice for a break from the sun and a little shelter.

The path took a shortish loop, and after a quarter of an hour, I found myself heading back toward the field gate that had led me into this modest woodland. Up ahead was a hut, reasonably large as it goes, enough for a small dwelling. The door on the front porch was padlocked. It had not long been painted a terracotta colour.

But with a padlock on the door, clearly nobody was at home, or were they?

As I approached this hut to make a portrait of Barney sat on the platform, there was a loud thud from within. My ears tingled, my stomach tightened, the hairs that I don’t have on my head stood on end, in a phantom way, clearly.

I would have cast the experience aside if it were not for a second thud, at which point the portrait session was over, Barns and I were out of there, quick smart, back along the path and sharply toward the car.

A year later, in the summer, searching my saved sat nav locations marked “good for dog walks and recordings”, I revisited to record on this path and in the woodland once again, my memory rather questioning the experience I’d had before. Perhaps it had been a big bird on the roof, perhaps an animal inside, perhaps… well, hang about, it was no longer there.

The hut wasn’t on the loop; it had simply vanished.

There was no sign of it.

I took a few possible turnings, but it was not to be found, and neither was any trace of foundations or the remnants of a dwelling torn down.

Heading back to the car, I saw someone walking a spaniel toward me. I wondered whether he was local and whether he could solve my mystery about the missing hut.

“No,” he said, “I’ve been walking this path for years; we only live about half a mile away. There’s never been a hut here. Never.”

He was positively positive about that fact, in gesture and tone.

It seemed pointless to remonstrate with him, so I stuttered some kind of apology and considered that I’d clearly got my paths in some kind of muddle, and started to walk off.

I hadn’t gone far along when he turned and shouted back.

“I have to say, though,” he said, “you’re not the first to have mentioned a hut. I had a lady ask me directions to it quite recently, actually, ’bout six months back.”

With that, he was off, and I assume he turned left into the woods, because I didn’t see him climbing the field where the barley had been.

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If you feel it is appropriate, please share, and let’s build a community of storytellers. I’d love to hear your stories and thoughts too, to weave into tales of their own in the future here?

What a wonderful sound, a perfect sound, not necessarily a perfect recording, I grant you. After all, my hand is outstretched with my iPhone recording as close as I can get to one of the birdboxes in our garden for a few seconds while Mum is off doing what bird mums do, bringing home sustenance for her little ones. So it was a snatched recording, then a pretty brisk retreat. I can honestly get a little wistful and teary at these kinds of sounds, at particular moments.

NB: This is one of those pieces where the audio will undoubtedly have more contextual impact.

I suspect this piece is going to make you raise at least one eyebrow and question if I’ve been taking a mind-altering substance in the writing and recording of it. Truth be known, it’s been a piece in the making for a while, inspired most recently by walks in the warmth of early morning late Spring, watching Barney, my fluffy companion, lazily chasing butterflies along the towpath, listening to cassette recordings of the brilliant late-night radio monologues about life from the late Joe Frank, and finding myself increasingly filled with wonder at how strange it is that any of us get to be here at all.

No alcohol or mushrooms involved.

One in four hundred trillion.

It’s a very contested number, but perhaps the most quoted odds when it comes to the statistical improbability of actually being here on this planet, to have even heard that recording.

I’ve been hearing a lot of hot air and bleating of late, and I’m not talking about the beautiful sound of lambs in a meadow. I’m really referring to the ungrateful, embittered, sorrowful, angry, resentful, entitled, disconnected, messianic, spiritually numb, ruthless sounds of powerful men who are absolutely incapable of comprehending the simple wonder and gift of being alive.

I doubt they’d appreciate the sound of hatchlings and certainly not link it to the sheer incredible fortune of being here to appreciate the beauty of it.

If you have your faculties and the ability to move through the world with some freedom, yet sacrifice your own spiritual proclivity on the altar of power, status and the endless hunger to dominate, you may never fully notice the strange fortune of being alive at all. Especially when there are people who would give anything simply to experience the ordinary parts of living without pain or limitation.

In purely mathematical terms, those people in white lab coats who have an abacus large enough to work out long numbers all agree on one thing: whatever the number of improbability is, you, I, those fledglings, mama bird, and the person who built the birdbox, probably shouldn’t be here at all.

And yet somehow, against all of that, here I am, and here you are.

Breathing.

Thinking.

Remembering things nobody else remembers in quite the same way.

It’s a bloody miracle.

Whatever name or belief you give it, existence is astonishing.

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The writer, Douglas Adams, understood this brilliantly in a book he wrote. He understood that existence is so wildly improbable that the only sensible response is either laughter or complete psychological collapse, and preferably laughter because collapse makes it difficult to enjoy a decent sandwich. I’m embracing my inner Douglas there.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s something called the Infinite Improbability Drive, a machine capable of taking a spaceship through every possible point in every possible universe at once. Which means that, statistically speaking, somewhere along the journey, the utterly impossible becomes briefly, alarmingly possible. A bowl of petunias may suddenly appear in deep space. A sperm whale can materialise several miles above a planet and have just enough time to wonder what on earth is happening to it before gravity introduces itself properly.

And perhaps that’s us.

Maybe consciousness itself is the ultimate improbability drive.

Against odds so ridiculous they become almost comic, atoms assembled themselves into something capable of listening to baby birds in a wooden box and feeling moved by it. Matter somehow became aware enough to notice birdsong, feel grief, see sunlight reflecting on water, or appreciate the smell of rain in woodland, and, I’ll level with you now, also comprehend the unbearable sadness of knowing none of it lasts forever.

Which is in itself, extraordinary really.

The universe, after billions of years of hydrogen knocking about in the dark, eventually produced a creature capable of standing in a garden whispering, “have a listen to this,” into a microphone, which let’s face it is a bonkers invention that is completely improbable when you think we’re all descended from something that is a single amoebic cell.

Let me embrace my inner Douglas again to note that perhaps religion would clear its throat at this point and say, “Well yes, this is where I come in,” while science would already be halfway through a complicated diagram involving carbon chains and probability theory.

Douglas Adams would probably be standing at the back of this argument making tea, muttering that whichever side is right, it’s still astonishing that a species capable of inventing leaf blowers can also write symphonies, fall in love, and cry at the sound of hatchlings hidden in a wooden box.

I think that my photographic habit, my desire to record sound, my more recent desire to write down what I feel, is the gift that I’m only just starting to realise is so much more important than the pound notes it has earned to help me pay a mortgage.

I’ve been too busy running on the hamster wheel to notice that most of us simply don’t stop.

We rush past existence as if it’s guaranteed. As if waking up tomorrow is part of some signed agreement. We fill our heads with deadlines and shopping lists and notifications and the low-level static of modern life until we become numb to the fact that any of this is happening at all.

Then something interrupts it.

A diagnosis.

A birth.

A funeral.

A blackbird singing at five in the morning when you can’t sleep.

And then, by magic, the world slips back into focus for a moment.

You remember you’re inside something miraculous.

Not miraculous in the glittery motivational poster sense, or the influencer saying how awesome blueberry muffins are, something more improbable than that.

I nearly called this piece ‘gratitude,’ but that seemed as plain as vanilla ice cream when Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream is on the same menu. Gratitude gets misunderstood because it’s presented like homework. You keep a journal, write down five things a day, and so on, but real gratitude doesn’t seem to appear in my life like that. I think it happens when I hear rain falling on leaves, or when I hear a blackbird singing into the last few minutes of daylight and feel, for reasons I can’t properly explain, grateful that I was around to hear it. That was a favourite sound from my grandmother’s back garden, on hot, lazy summer evenings when we went to visit, and I was still in single-digit age numbers.

But come on, those little sounds from the bird box I recorded. The frantic peeping of new life demanding food before they even understand what life is yet. Creatures no bigger than a thumb arriving into existence with absolute determination. That is magic.

Maybe gratitude begins there. Not with possessions or achievements, but with awareness.

Because once you really notice things, materialism starts losing some of its grip.

Not entirely. We all like comfort. Nice things. I’m not pretending otherwise. But when people reach the end of their lives, they rarely ask for one last chance to sit in better traffic.

They want more sunsets.

More conversations.

More time with the dog asleep beside them.

More walks.

More ordinary Tuesdays they once thought were forgettable.

It’s perhaps a melancholic musing, but every now and then, I find myself wondering what it would feel like if you knew you were about to read a story to your child for the last time, because they no longer need you to, or no longer want you to, or because something like TikTok has stolen their attention instead. I think you’d read those final few pages very differently. You’d probably hang onto each sentence a little longer.

Life is full of endings that don’t announce themselves, like that, including the last time your children want to hold your hand in public.

The final time you hear a friend’s laugh before illness changes it.

And because we don’t know when those moments arrive, they pass through our hands disguised as ordinary life.

Maybe gratitude is simply understanding that ordinary life is not ordinary at all.

Look at what we get.

The taste of cold water when you’re thirsty.

Bread still warm from the oven.

Warm coastal wind against your face.

The strange comfort of hearing children shouting and laughing at lunchtime in the school playground.

The smell of cut grass drifting through an open window.

A dog losing its mind with happiness because you came home.

Music that somehow understands your feelings better than language does.

Laughter that arrives at the completely wrong moment and makes everything worse and better simultaneously.

Even grief, in a strange way, points back toward gratitude. We grieve because something mattered. Because we loved. Because we were lucky enough to encounter someone or something worth missing.

That’s the deal, really.

To be alive is to become vulnerable to loss.

But the alternative is nothing at all.

No birdsong.

No rivers.

No taste of coffee.

No autumn light through trees.

No voice saying your name.

Nothing.

And despite all the pain stitched through human existence, most people still cling fiercely to life. Even difficult lives. Even broken ones.

That says something enormous.

Somewhere underneath all our complaining and worrying, we know this experience is extraordinary.

A consciousness able to observe itself, and this is about as scientific as I can muster, atoms contemplating atoms.

The universe becoming aware enough to hear a blackbird sing.

I know that sounds grand, maybe even slightly mad, but sometimes late at night it genuinely hits me. Out of all the billions of years before I arrived, and the billions that will come after I’m gone, I get this brief flicker.

This tiny candle of awareness.

I get to see trees.

I get to love people.

I get to stand in a kitchen at midnight eating toast while the house sleeps.

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That’s unbelievable when you think about it for more than thirty seconds.

Maybe that’s why nature affects us so deeply. It pulls us back into the present tense. A stream doesn’t care about your unread emails. Birds aren’t interested in your status or your bank balance. The wind couldn’t give a monkey’s that you have ten less subscribers than you had a couple of days ago. The natural world keeps asking the same question:

Are you here?

Not tomorrow.

Not yesterday.

Now.

Can you hear this?

Can you notice your own existence long enough to understand how strange and beautiful it is?

Like a message scratched into a tree, or sprayed onto a wall; I was here.

I heard the hatchlings.

I felt the wind.

I noticed.

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Five, possibly seven kilograms. Possibly up to ten for a denser sweet or candy. That’s how much one of those big jars of sweets weighs.

Grandma lay spark out on the shop floor, beneath the ladder that stretched to the higher reaches of the display of jars filled with sweets.

“Rose,” said Grandad, “Rose!”

You might have thought his exasperated calls were down to concern for his wife, who’d just received a full jar of, let’s say Pear Drops for the sake of a good story, on her head from a height of at least a metre, possibly more. It was a clean strike, and had, to use a quaintism (if there is such an expression), knocked Grandma into next Tuesday.

She’d been polaxed, floored, slung a custard (proper old boxing term), ironed out, seen the stars, sent to the land of nod.

“Rose!”

Nothing, no movement.

“Rose, stop mucking about, I’ve another two jars to pass down.”

Unless you've heard or read the previous edition (Kid in a Candy Store), none of this makes much sense. You’ve missed the tour of my grandfather’s confectionery and tobacco shop, a gem of a past era, replaced by a shop with all the soul of the devil’s counting house. You also missed the way he unceremoniously destroyed an antique Fry’s Chocolates window with a golf ball one Christmas, trying to drive the ball from the open shop door across a busy arterial road into London, and the tour of his tobacco den where he mixed in secrecy special orders for visiting Tottenham Hotspur players on the way to a match. This is nineteen seventy something by the way; I can’t see world-class footballers dropping by H.A. Stewart’s in Enfield to stock up on their Woodbines prior to playing United on a Saturday.

Anyway, that’s probably set the scene, oh, along with this big librarian-style ladder on rollers that was used to reach a floor-to-ceiling array of every traditional sweet you can imagine in big glass jars that ran around the entire shop in a U shape.

“Rose! Rose!”

I think it was dawning on Grandad Harry that he’d actually badly hurt my grandmother by dropping a jar on her head, one that, whilst she was supposed to be catching them and had done so thousands of times before, on this occasion found her attention switch at just the wrong moment, as Harry was dropping a jar from the top shelf.

I’m relaying the story that is family folklore; I wasn’t there at that precise moment, but Nelly, my grandad’s sister, was. She worked in the shop, had viewed this scene unfold, and rushed to my grandmother’s aid briskly.

Remember how I suggested my grandfather was never wrong? I give you the low sun that apparently blinded him momentarily when he shanked the golf ball. Well, this was another such moment.

“She moved the ladder,” he protested. “Moved it she did, I’m telling you.”

Please don’t misunderstand me, he was neither belligerent nor uncaring, just, well, in his own Grandad Harry world, with habits that made sense to him.

He kept, for instance, all the shop’s takings for years under the bed in the spare room, in the living quarters above the shop where I slept when I went to visit. It was a small box room, made smaller by the fact that it was used as a further tobacco store. Money on one side, under the bed, a wall of tobacco on the other. I’m told it was a fire risk; he’d have simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Rose, where else am I gonna put it?”

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He had a Corgi called Skipper, which was, sorry Grandad, a cantankerous old whatsit. On another Christmas, I got bitten on my nose, quite badly, just before the Christmas dinner was served. I’d been trying to go to the loo, which was through the small living room behind the shop and up the thin flight of long stairs. I think I must have startled Skipper, who turned on me and somehow reached my face. I don’t remember that part of the story. I do remember blood, lots of it, and Grandad’s calls of, “Don’t let him bleed on the carpet, that’s new that is.”

When we returned from Chase Farm Hospital’s accident and emergency department later that afternoon, with me sporting a rather large bandage on my nose and a blackening eye, Grandad had been in discussions with the family and decided that, clearly, I had sat on Skipper and was trying to ride on his back like a pony.

How he knew this, I don’t know, but he was fiercely loyal to Skipper. I never went near the dog again, certainly never fussed over him anymore. Weirdly, Skipper used to follow me around the shop, wagging his tail forevermore, until his eventual old age demise. I sense he felt guilty for telling Grandad I’d tried to ride him like Red Rum.

Somewhere between the pear drops falling from the sky onto Grandma’s head, Grandad Harry defending himself with “she moved the ladder,” golf balls through windows, and Skipper the grumpy corgi, apparently reporting fabricated pony-riding allegations back to the family committee, I realise something through my tales.

Families are built as much on stories as they are on blood.

Maybe more so.

Because none of this really survives as fact anymore. Not entirely. The details bend over time. Somebody adds something, and somebody forgets something. Somebody claims Grandma Rose was unconscious for ten minutes, somebody else says she sat straight up and was more worried about the jar lying broken on the floor.

But does it really matter?

The story lives on because it’s become our family history, mythology even. Tiny legends handed down over kitchen tables and Christmas dinners, and every family has them.

The uncle who accidentally drove into a duck pond.

The aunt who ran off briefly with a magician in nineteen sixty-eight, one year after I was born.

“Did that really happen, Neale?”

Wouldn’t you like to know?

The cousin who vanished at a wedding and was found asleep in a hedge at dawn, wearing somebody else’s shoes. I don’t know where that thought came from, but come on, it must have happened to someone.

These stories become heirlooms, bent and scratched things, and wondrously so.

I wonder whether we’ve become slightly poorer at keeping these legends alive now that everything is photographed, recorded, uploaded, timestamped, and, heaven forbid, fact-checked.

Stories used to have more space to breathe. That is, after all, how stories become legends. They change shape depending on who told them. Your grandmother’s version differed from your father’s version. Somebody exaggerated for comic effect. Somebody softened the darker corners of a story that otherwise might have ended up in the “you can’t ever tell that story” file.

Now we reach for evidence.

Video it, or it didn’t happen.

But family folklore was never really about accuracy.

It’s about sitting somewhere years later and saying, “Do you remember when...”

And instantly, everybody is back there. Back in the sweet shop. At Chase Farm Hospital, having your nose bandaged.

One of the reasons for telling this story over the last couple of episodes is that in my other role as a celebrant at funerals, I witness a room of relatives, sometimes quite a full room, remembering these kinds of stories when I’m writing a tribute. Honestly, I could write at least one of these a week based on what I hear in those meetings alone.

Long after somebody has gone, their habits and isms remain alive for the telling.

I can still hear Grandad Harry in certain phrases. Still see him standing there in that tobacco-scented shop defending himself against impossible odds entirely of his own making. I can see the dust in the afternoon light in that tobacco store. I can just about hear the rollers of the ladder rattling across the wooden floorboards, or were they ceramic tiles, come to think of it. Or does that really even matter? Let’s make them floorboards.

That’s why these tales matter more than we realise, because one day somebody will tell stories about us. They’ll probably not be about the promotions or tax returns or passwords we spent half our lives worrying about; they’ll be the odd things, the way, I don’t know, you couldn’t whistle for toffee, or tell really bad jokes, or the dent you left in the garage door of your in-laws that you weren’t exactly honest about.

Maybe it’ll be the disastrous camping trip, the time you got lost three streets from home and insisted the map was wrong, sounds like a possible grandad-ism.

These are the surviving fragments, the human pieces that outlive us, and they’re all the better for becoming living, breathing, changing stories.

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If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll be familiar with Honeydukes Sweet Shop. This emporium of ever so different confectionery sold Chocolate Frogs that leapt out of their boxes with collectable cards tucked inside (the box, that is, not the frog), Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans that genuinely tasted of anything from strawberry to earwax, Fizzing Whizzbees that made you float, Exploding Bonbons that did exactly what the name suggested, and Sugar Quills you could chew in class.

What the shop could have looked like. Well, it certainly is in my memory.

Honeydukes had this Victorian veneer about it: a sweet shop from a bygone era, not like your average pile-it-high, sell-it-cheaper, because-the-bars-are-a-third-smaller-than-they-used-to-be shop.

Having said that, I come from an age when I remember a Mars Bar was ten to fifteen pence. They were one of my favourites, and I could confidently make one last an hour, chewed oh so very slowly. I grabbed a coffee the other day on a dog walk and went to buy one, but they’re now £1.30. Well, there they are. I made do with the coffee.

But if Honeydukes looked special, you should have visited my Grandad’s place in Enfield, just north of London’s metropolis. It sat in a parade of shops, flanked by a greengrocer and the kind of pharmacy that, in its day, John Pemberton would have sold original Coca-Cola from. That’s how I remember it: wood-panelled, traditional and, like something out of a museum, even then, as a child.

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Despite decimalisation, Grandad refused to change the main cash register, one where those tickets flicked up to show the final tally, one of those big brass sit-up numbers that did a proper ker-ching when you opened the drawer. There were others, but that was Grandad’s till and, from memory, he was quite protective of it.

Saying I grew up in it is a little far-fetched, really, in that it was my playground when I went to stay or visit.

The place still has a strong magical draw, even though Grandad Harry and his wife, Grandma Rose, left this world more than three decades ago.

Now, as a photographer talking to other photographers about visiting far-flung places or unfamiliar locations, I often suggest it’s like photographing in a candy store; everything looks wonderful, different, and intriguing. What may be normal to one person who has seen the same view thousands upon thousands of times over will be a scene more extraordinary to, say, me.

My Grandfather’s shop was a fantastical place, much like Honeydukes, so I thought I’d go look it up on Google Street View and, when I found it, my heart frankly sank.

“Oh, look at that, it’s dreadful. What’s happened to the amazing façade it had? Where’s the worn-out olive green sun and rain shelter? Where’s all that beautiful wood panelling and lovely old door to match?”

It’s become completely charmless, with a horrible, small neon “OPEN” sign and an invitation to “pay your bills here.” The main door is now set in some form of aluminium frame, no different to all the others in the parade, and it’s turned into a shop that sells everything. It’s gone from being the Honeydukes of my childhood to just another shell full of stuff.

We had a living museum, and we took it for granted. There’s barely a photo left in the whole ever-decreasing family, so perhaps it falls to me to share what this looked like and, though it may not be a photograph you can reference, perhaps you can, in the developing tray that is your mind and imagination, go with me.

H.A. Stewart’s, tobacco, and confectioners, with, for the favoured few, if you walked through the shop, a lean-to where Harry cut your hair on proper pump-up chairs. Apparently, he was a trained barber, though Mum let him go nowhere near my hair as a child.

The shop had, at one stage, decorative windows that in today’s money would be Grade One listed, I’m sure. They were etched and hand-painted with the words Fry’s Chocolate. They stood proudly as a nod to an era where stickers weren’t the advertising collateral. You had hand-painted signs within hand-painted windows, and Grandad’s shop carried this display proudly for decades and decades, until...

It was Boxing Day, nineteen-seventy-something, and Harry opened the shop despite protestations from the family.

“It’s Christmas, Harry, ‘ave a couple of days off,” the family chimed in unison.

“Rose,” he said, because he rarely listened, or indeed left the shop, “I’m opening up for a couple of hours.”

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Harry Stewart loved a round of golf, and actually, he did leave the shop during opening hours every Thursday to play a round at Winchmore Hill Golf Club. He allowed himself this luxury at least.

His clubs were always on hand just out back in the living quarters part of the shop, as they indeed were this Boxing Day occasion in nineteen-seventy-something, when for some reason he and a customer decided to settle a wager that my Grandfather couldn’t drive a golf ball across and over the busy Great Cambridge Road, a dual carriageway that was the main northern arterial route into London, from inside the shop.

Whilst plausible, there were factors like trees on each side of the, shall we call it, urban fairway, a busy road that was rarely quiet, even at Christmas, and a doorway opening that meant your shot would need to rise sharply if it were to clear the paths, the single parking road adjacent to the shop, then the dual carriageway itself, missing the flow of traffic and arriving at the other side, hopefully landing on the grass verge in front of a row of houses, without striking vehicles or people.

This is obviously utter madness, but my Grandad had a wonderful eccentricity that sat well with the challenge, and so, unbeknownst to the family, who were out back preparing a Boxing Day feast or watching telly, the shot was set up. A makeshift tee was made from something, probably a 15p Mars Bar, and my grandfather lined up the shot.

Steady as he goes, feet planted, knees softly bent, arms loose at the address, one last look at the target, then eyes down on the ball. He draws the club back and up, weight shifting to the back foot, a breath held at the top of the swing, and then the downswing, hips turning through first, arms following, the clubface meeting the ball with that satisfying crack and then...

He properly shanked it, the ball fizzing off at a vicious angle, smashing through the corner of the display window on his right before the glass gave way, a sharp crack followed by the tinkling collapse of the pane folding inward.

Done.

The family rushed out and looked on in horror. Fry’s didn’t make windows like this anymore, and this relic of a bygone era had just been taken out by a wayward golf ball.

One thing you need to know about Grandad Harry is that he could never be wrong. He’d destroyed this historical signage, but rather than cower in the corner, horrified by this ridiculous act of needless self-vandalism, he found fault immediately in the low sun blinding him for a split second, the split second of the strike.

H.A. Stewart’s had a sort of den at the back of the shop, behind the counter, which you entered through an opening, from memory, framed by an architrave. This den was shelved on every surface you could find, and a shelving unit sat in the middle, packed tight with every leading tobacco and mixing jars.

It’s not fashionable to say, and I’m pleased I didn’t end up a smoker or pipe artist like my grandfather, but the smell of that den was exquisite. The old wood, this sweet, almost caramel warmth of pipe tobacco that had been smoked in that room for decades as my grandfather mixed special blends for customers, had simply become part of it.

As a child, it felt like a hidden room from another century. Customers would lean on the counter and lower their voices slightly when discussing their mixtures, as though they were talking to a tailor about a suit. My grandfather knew them all. One man liked something darker in winter. Another wanted a blend that reminded him of whatever he’d smoked during National Service. Names were written in pencil on little cards tucked behind jars, the handwriting fading after years of fingers and tobacco dust.

Some of those special customers were football players, names from his beloved Tottenham Hotspur, who would pop into H.A. Stewart’s to buy their tobacco before turning up to play.

And then there was the shop itself.

Grandma and Grandad’s sweet shop seemed to stretch upwards forever. Dark wooden shelves rose from the floor to the ceiling, wrapping around the walls in a great horseshoe shape, every inch occupied by glass jars, tins, packets, and boxes that looked as though they had been sitting there since before the war. New brands may have appeared here and there, but the bones of the shop belonged to another age.

The shelves were packed so tightly that it was hard to imagine how anyone kept track of it all. Great bell jars stood shoulder to shoulder. Inside were pear drops glowing amber and gold beneath the lights, mint humbugs twisted like little barber poles, sherbet lemons, aniseed balls, cough candy, barley sugars, winter mixture, Everton mints, liquorice torpedoes, Pontefract cakes, clove rock, army and navy sweets, cola cubes, acid drops and floral gums that tasted faintly of perfume and old ladies’ handbags.

There were coconut mushrooms, chocolate limes, treacle toffee wrapped in greaseproof paper, and little paper twists filled with mixed boiled sweets, weighed out on brass scales that I was allowed to measure.

The adult sweets sat slightly apart from the children’s treasures, as though they belonged to a different world entirely. Liquorice root stacked in bundles. Hard black cough candies and menthol sweets for throats roughened by cigarettes and cold weather. Dark toffees that could pull a filling loose if you were careless.

To reach the highest shelves, there was a ladder. It ran on a brass track fixed all the way around the shop, curving neatly at the corners so the ladder could glide without stopping. To me, at that age, there was only one other place that had something like this: the old library in our hometown. My grandfather moved along it with complete confidence, one hand reaching for jars while my grandmother steadied the base and gently pushed him onwards. He would collect things as he travelled: a tin from one shelf, a jar from another, packets tucked beneath his arm with the ease of a man who knew every inch of the place blindfolded.

From below, as a child, it looked almost magical. The ladder creaked as it rolled along the curved track above the counter, my grandfather suspended amongst hundreds of jars and colours and smells, like the keeper of some enormous edible archive.

“Rose,” he’d shout, “catch this,” and he’d drop from height one of those large glass jars full of pear drops, and my grandmother would somehow catch the jar, place it on the counter and ready herself for the next, which on this day arrived sooner than expected...

What happened next became part of family folklore for years afterwards, and I shall tell you that part of the story in the next edition.

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Pic: Anna

But a tortoise? I wrestle with keeping creatures that aren’t native to where I live because there’s a genuine moral question that I don’t think I can just wave away like an Asian hornet, which is equally not native to these parts and many times less desirable to look after.

But perhaps, and this is my get out of jail free card, there is something unexpectedly valuable about caring for an animal with more exotic requirements. A dog fits around your life. Well, except mine, who has me most certainly fitting around his.

A tortoise isn’t particularly high maintenance. They certainly don’t jump on your head at 5.47 in the morning, a whole hour ahead of walkies time, with over-enthusiastic and clearly over-ambitious intent.

But you do have to learn its world.

Most people assume the shell, for instance, to be basically a suitcase, just something a tortoise lives inside, but it’s actually fused to their spine and ribcage and packed with nerve endings. So if you scratch it gently, they can feel it, and some of them clearly enjoy it.

What also catches new owners off guard is how unforgiving the temperature requirements are, not just for comfort, but because once a tortoise drops outside its required range, digestion and immune function can essentially stop working. Get it wrong, and you’re not dealing with a cold animal; you’re dealing with a sick one.

Then there’s the personality question, which nobody really prepares for. People expect something passive and decorative, and instead they get an animal that might blank them for a fortnight because it’s decided it doesn’t trust them yet. And if you do build that trust and find yourself wanting to rehome one someday, you might discover that certain species, Hermann’s tortoise included, require a special certificate to buy or sell legally in the UK, which tends to come as a surprise.

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And then there’s the age thing. Dogs and cats that live to twenty plus are thought of as rather special and somewhat blessed, but a tortoise is almost certainly going to outlive you comfortably, and by some margin, perhaps by fifty to a hundred years. You’re not just choosing a pet. You’re making a decision that will need to be written into your will.

That leads on to this reptile thing, of course, because that’s what it is. And whilst it’s not exactly some kind of viper that could possibly kill you if it escaped and you ended up rolling over on to it in the middle of the night as it found a warm place to kip, it is a member of a family of creatures older than the ark itself. Three hundred and ten million years of evolving, bloody slowly.

It won’t outrun you, or sting you, or strip your vital organs of the ability to function with one unfortunate nibble. Think of a tortoise less as the overexcited PE teacher fresh out of university with a clipboard full of initiatives, and more as a retired history teacher who has embraced sunbathing more than you would imagine and enjoys cucumber.

Imagine being nature and pitching the tortoise idea. You can imagine the focus group, can’t you, as this idea was brought to the table?

“Right, I’ve got a new creature.”

“Go on.”

“It’s basically a walking coffee table.”

“Fast?”

“No.”

“Dangerous?”

“Not remotely.”

“What’s its defence mechanism?”

“It takes its house with it.”

Our tortoise has been with us, I would say, nigh on ten years now. His name is George, a good, solid, serious-sounding name.

George spends a lot of his life doing things very slowly. He doesn’t rush toward food as though he’s late for a meeting. He doesn’t panic because somebody else has got a better leaf. He just moves with this steady certainty that eventually he will arrive where he intended to go.

There’s something oddly confident about that.

Humans, meanwhile, have gone entirely the other way.

We answer messages while walking into doors.

We eat lunch standing up.

We say things before we’ve thought them through, then spend three years explaining what we actually meant.

I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if more decisions were made with tortoise timing.

Imagine a tortoise politician.

“What’s your response to this developing situation?”

Long pause.

A blink.

Possibly a small bite of lettuce.

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

Three business weeks later, he raises his head slightly.

“I have concerns.”

And honestly, compared with certain world leaders who seem to make announcements with the emotional stability of a shopping trolley on ice, it starts to sound quite appealing, doesn’t it?

Maybe the problem isn’t that some people move too slowly.

Maybe it’s that too many people move before their conscience has caught up.

That’s the beauty of my daily walks with my camera and journaling my thoughts here.

At the beginning of a walk, my head is usually still travelling at motorway speed. Lists. Worries. Fragments of conversations. Things I should’ve said. Things I definitely shouldn’t have said. The mind arrives noisy.

But photography, whatever kind you practise and whether you earn or not from it, refuses to work properly when you’re rushing.

You can’t really notice light in a hurry.

You don’t see the way rain sits on a gatepost or how evening light turns ordinary pavement into something almost theatrical. Those things appear when your internal engine finally drops a gear.

Sometimes I’ll stand for five minutes looking at absolutely nothing obvious. Just waiting. And eventually something reveals itself. A shape. A shadow. A moment where everything lines up for half a second.

And then sometimes, nothing ends up happening at all.

Perhaps people would understand each other better if we slowed down long enough for thoughts to fully appear.

If somebody tells you something painful, the instinct is often to fix it immediately. Respond immediately. Fill the silence immediately.

But some of the best conversations I’ve ever had arrived after a pause.

Not an awkward silence.

Slowing down lets thoughts finish forming.

It lets instinct get questioned.

It gives conscience time to tap you on the shoulder and say, “Are you absolutely sure about this?”

George never seems burdened by urgency.

He’ll spend ages examining one corner of the garden as though he’s conducting a land survey for future generations.

And meanwhile, I’m checking the time while brushing my teeth.

There’s probably a balance in all this. You can’t run a fire brigade entirely on tortoise principles.

Although even then, a tortoise firefighter would probably remain extremely calm.

Tiny helmet.

Slow nod.

“We will attend the blaze.”

Eventually.

But I do think there’s something deeply human about learning when not to accelerate.

Some of the worst moments in life happen because people react before they reflect.

Anger moves quickly.

Fear moves quickly.

Crowds move quickly.

Wisdom usually doesn’t.

Wisdom has a shell on its back and takes a while crossing the patio.

Perhaps that’s why I like photographing on walks so much. It forces me into the speed of noticing. The speed George already understands, naturally.

A speed where you remember that the world is not just something to race through.

Sometimes it’s something to stand still in.

Or at least shuffle through thoughtfully, carrying your house with you.

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Two and a half thousand years ago, “like and subscribe” clearly wasn’t a currency, or a way of thinking that humankind attached relevance, reverence, importance, or any other word ending in “ce” to, certainly not Buddhists.

And on the note of Buddhism itself, I’d like to introduce you to something I learned about only recently, ironically enough, in a place which is all about “like and subscribe,” YouTube.

Pic: Snehanshu Dharmadhikari

Mandala (pronounced MAN-duh-luh) is the Sanskrit word for circle, or, more accurately, a disc, a sort of contained world. So think less of a physical drawn shape (I could never draw circles anyway) and more of a bounded space with something held inside it. Like a cricket boundary with cricketers inside, or like a frying pan with a thin layer of rice. Hopefully pilau, my favourite.

Actually, the concept of mandala comes from a tradition older than Buddhism, appearing first in Hinduism, in texts dating back perhaps three and a half thousand years, and the basic idea has remained consistent over that time: a geometric symbol representing the universe, used as a tool for meditation and focus. Circles within circles, patterns that pull the eye inward.

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When Tibetan Buddhism adopted the form, it brought its own layer of purpose. The mandala in this tradition represents something closer to a sacred map, a symbolic cosmology, the structure of an enlightened mind.

I feel at this moment I want to join together by saying ommmmm, but I don’t want to appear flippant.

Monks create their own form of mandala from sand, large colourful circles of sand, intricate patterns (remember, circles within circles) and the ones doing it have trained for years before they’re permitted anywhere near one in a ceremonial context.

Again, without being flippant, it’s like starting a hobby and building up to the moment you can then practise your craft for a higher purpose, in this case, ceremony.

The work takes days, sometimes weeks, and multiple monks work together, starting at the centre, of course, and moving outward, placing grains of coloured sand using small metal funnels called chak-pur. The funnel releases a controlled stream of sand, not poured as it sounds, but guided.

The scale of patience required to lay down millions of grains into patterns of this intense intricacy, over that length of time, while people wander past taking photographs on their phones, fascinates me. I’m sure some visiting tourists imagine this to be a form of more recent entertainment rather than an age-old practice.

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Once completed, everyone steps back, observes it, then someone steps in and simply brushes it away.

“What have you just done? That’s taken me weeks, that has.”

There are a few accounts of this unexpected end to something so beautifully and reverently created.

One is that, perhaps in a more traditional way, a door or window is opened, and the wind simply takes the mandala, or pattern, away.

It’s not quite true, as it happens, well, not today at any rate. The monks deliberately use a particularly dense sand, specifically to stop wind and accidental disturbance from undoing the work before they choose to.

The ending isn’t so passive. They do it themselves, with a ritual that mirrors the care that’s gone into the making. A lead monk draws lines through the finished pattern, horizontally, then vertically, and then others join in, pushing the sand inward until this intricate, weeks-long creation is a pile of grey-brown nothing.

The sand gets wrapped in silk, carried to a river, and released into the current. Whatever intention went into the making gets dispersed outward, rather than sitting there being admired. It’s beautifully tragic to someone who can only see it as a destroyed work of art, but to the monks, this is precisely the point: that nothing of value was ever contained in the object itself, only in the making of it, and in the release.

I suppose the romantic in me likes the idea of the breeze taking this creation, even though it leans on inaccuracy. Well, certainly by today’s narrative at least.

The wind taking the mandala suggests entrusting nature to reclaim something you have made, and it’s this uneasiness that probably doesn’t compute for most of us, including me. Because we are not like that at all, are we?

In terms of social media, we’ve spent the last decade and a half measuring how well our output is received, in real time, by as many people as possible, and we check those systems constantly. It didn’t start like that, from memory. I can’t remember thinking, “I wonder how many people have looked at this post,” not at the beginning.

The need to know started to creep in. It nudged into my life without so much as a personal introduction.

“Hello, I’m Social Media Validation. Strange name, I know, not even hyphenated. Anyway, I’m here to make you feel as good and as bad in equal measure. And I’m never going to move out.”

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And actually, this didn’t affect just professional creators, it was pretty much everyone, if I can generalise for effect, or a moment. You put something out, you check back in within the hour, probably. Sometimes within minutes. Not because you’re vain, necessarily, but because these feedback loops, as they’re known, have been made so immediate and so easy to read that not checking, for some, for many, actually feels uncomfortable.

And to be fair to ourselves, it’s not all bad. If you’re running a business, if your income depends on reach, if you’re trying to build something that actually connects with people, the metrics, well, they matter.

An Instagram account with 20,000 engaged followers is a different proposition to one with a couple of hundred, and pretending otherwise is the kind of thing people say when they don’t need the money.

Validation has real-world currency. It opens doors, and it gets you taken seriously in rooms where you’d otherwise be invisible. I’m not interested in making a pious argument that none of it counts, because that just wouldn’t be true.

But I do think there’s a thing that begins to invade your conscience.

You start making work, or at least you did once, because there was something you wanted to say or show or figure out. Then, at some point, you start anticipating the response before the work is finished.

You make small adjustments because you know doing it this way or that gets more thumbs up or heart emojis. And the metrics reward you for it, so you keep doing it, and eventually you look at what you’re making, in all its competent, well-performing glory, and realise that it doesn’t feel like yours anymore. Well, not in quite the way it did.

The monks building the mandala couldn’t do this even if they wanted to. The design is prescribed, passed down, and mapped to specific teachings; personal innovation is largely forbidden.

Every grain goes where the tradition says it goes. But within that, there’s still a level of attention being paid to the thing itself, to the rightness of the making, that has nothing to do with how it will be received, because that question is entirely absent from the process. No audience is shaping the work from the inside.

“But where’s the creativity in that?” you might rightly ask. And I think you might have more than a grain of sand of a point in that. “Surely the fun, or the pleasure, is in making something that surprises people.”

But there’s a difference between making something and then sharing it, and making something in anticipation of how people might receive it.

I think that sequence means a lot, because once the audience is inside the creative process from the beginning, it changes what gets made.

The weeks of mandala work done with complete attention, knowing the whole time that the ending is already decided, and that nobody’s approval changes what gets built or how carefully it gets built, must be really refreshing to the soul, if you don’t mind me getting all woo-woo for a moment.

The work just is what it is, without any of that noise around it. You’re not checking in constantly across the weeks to see how it’s being received, although I guess there’s a little anxiety hoping that the new cleaner hasn’t bought one of those autonomous vacuum units that runs around in the middle of the night.

“Has anyone seen my mandala? It was there yesterday.”

Here’s what mandala-creating monks understand that the algorithm doesn’t, and maybe never will. The likes don’t last. They never did, they never will. The post that got three hundred hearts in 2023 is buried so deep now that even you’ve forgotten it.

It’s taken me a while to go over and over in my mind how to resolve this piece, but I think I have it. Go with me.

The sand mandala that took three weeks to build and thirty seconds to sweep away didn’t vanish without a trace. It went into the river, yes, but also into the people who made it, in terms of their creative and meditative purpose, and I think that’s an understanding about permanence that, whilst trickier to think about than “how many people saw it as they swiped by and left a like,” has a degree of honesty that a post peaking on a Tuesday and forgotten by Wednesday simply can’t match.

Perhaps there’s another way to think about this, too.

The likes don’t last. The making might.

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If you’ve been enjoying these stories of life from a photographer, please consider sharing this post with someone you feel may enjoy them. There’s a first part of this story, the episode just prior to this. It’ll help what I’m about to tell you make a lot more sense, so for the context alone, it’s worth skipping back, as they say.

Pic: Tim Hüfner

Having said that, I’m imagining you might be on one of your multitasking days and have no time for skipping, or maybe you’ve just stumbled across this episode and are just intrigued by today’s title thinking you’ve happened across true crime, or perhaps, and I think this is statistically more likely, you’re in a car somewhere on the A14 with a pasty in your lap and your full concentration somewhere else entirely. So, let me do one of those short TV recaps, as they do in grown-up drama.

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I got a job as a weekend DJ in a nightclub in Waltham Abbey near to London, aged 19, showed up thirty minutes late for my audition, and met a man, the ‘head doorman/security/I’ll do anything for the boss’ man, with a scar the full length of his face who in a ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ style, introduced himself simply as Scarface.

This was also a man who, as you’ll discover, had historical associations with Ronnie Kray, one of the most feared gangsters (one half of the Kray Twins) to have walked through East London in the 50s and 60s, oh and one more thing: Scarface, at this audition, had my hand in a squeezy death handshake and told me he was ‘going to look after me’. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but I had a fairly strong feeling that I was about to find out.

TV drama recap done, let’s start and end this story here, in part 2, appropriately titled Scarface and Ronnie Kray.

My audition at the nightclub just about in the grip of London, ten miles from where the Krays had control of their manor, as it’s known, went well.

Well, I say well, I messed up some mixes, sounded like a ‘sh*t scared teenager’ on the microphone, according to Scarface, and temporarily broke the door to the DJ booth as I thought it opened inwards and not outwards.

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“You never have a DJ booth door open inwards,” explained Scarface, as if it were obvious, “because that way when someone gets pi**ed off you’re not playing their song, they can’t push the door in to get at ya.”

That all made perfect sense to me, apart from the fact I’d just pushed the door inwards and pulled the two hinges out, without too much effort at all, and I certainly wasn’t an unhappy Sex Pistols fan.

I moot the Pistols, because the only time I’d seen real trouble on my watch as a DJ to that point, was at the John O Gaunt pub in my home town, just across the road from my school, right next to the tax office, which is a story for another time.

I’d been holding off playing the Sex Pistols all night, a threatening demand being made by the town’s thug, a thug with the worst name a thug could possibly have, Eggy. I thought Edgy would have been more appropriate for this reasonably unpredictable basket case, but Eggy it was. I’m thinking he once tried to etch the name Edgy into a table at school with a crayon, but couldn’t spell it. And so Eggy was born, like the nasty emotional smell he left wherever he went in the town.

He’s no doubt got a proper, respectable job now, so for the first time in a long while, I feel I can release my inhibitions and share, or perhaps overshare. Thank you for listening. I feel so much better now, as they say in counselling.

“Play Sex Pistols, or I’ll hit ya,” was his opening, middle and end gambit.

I’d plucked up the courage and said ‘no’ to Eggy a number of times, knowing full well it was on the blacklisted account of songs or bands in that pub, not because they didn’t appreciate them, I’m sure, but because usually, prohibited songs or bands were tried and tested fight starters. Play one of those and you wouldn’t be asked back to play, ever.

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But with the threats thick and fast from Eggy’s seven-word request strategy, I eventually caved and played that very nice song about love, peace and harmony, the Good Ship Venus.

Eggy prowled the dance floor as it started up, and actually, if you know the song, it is in part a bit of a singalong, sort of, unlikely punk karaoke, until about a minute in, when all hell breaks loose, and anyone and anything is fair game.

Eggy grabbed a poor unsuspecting tax assistant, I did say we were the pub adjacent to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs at the time, and threw him clean through my disco unit, which despite being fashioned out of mum and dad’s old rigid mahogany sideboard, folded, like a deck of cards. The Squire bass bins I had, one for the DJs in here, were pushed over, all the wires were ripped from their casings and that was that, night over, as was my residency at the John O Gaunt pub.

Rules are rules for a reason. Although my face did at least stay intact that night. I’d not been egged, as I recall the threat as being. Egged. Honestly.

Anyway, 3, 2, 1, back in the room and back at the club in 1986, I’d got the DJ job.

Having been successful at the audition, it didn’t take long until John, the manager you met in the first episode informed me, I couldn’t have the weekend gig, because I was essentially not very talented in the conventional sense, but being nineteen, he reckoned the ladies (his words now) would love a sacrificial nineteen year old lamb on every Friday for the popular Divorced Separated and Singles night.

“Lucky for you, Scarface is on the door those nights, and I hear he’s said he’ll look after you.”

“Lucky for me,” I thought.

I’ll save the many stories of what opened my eyes in the late night to early morning hours of the dingy red club under the snooker club and in those hidden away booths where I’m sure they enjoyed quiet games of scrabble and Mahjong, but needless to say, the nearly two years spent there were like a finishing school of one where the curriculum included the etiquette of knowing when to turn the lights fully up during a contretemps, the correct response when someone produces an illegal pint of ale on the dancefloor, and a working knowledge of exactly how much trouble a man in a good suit and bad intentions can cause before Scarface materialises, apparently from nowhere.

Scarface was fearless. He liked a good roughing up, although he did the roughing, even when it was two on one. And over the months he did indeed “look after me,” but not in a face-filling, hang-you-over-the-side-of-the-building-by-your-foot way.

I think he took me somewhat under his wing really. I was rather hoping Eggy might turn up at one of my gigs so I could refuse to play Sex Pistols and point him out to Scarface with my security torch I’d been given to point out trouble.

He also carried my record boxes out to the car each night while I parked up at the rear exit fire doors, to make sure the local louts didn’t touch me, or my red Vauxhall Astra 1.3 estate. Actually, he put word out that if my car was so much as looked at by those smoking whatever in the darker recesses of the ground floor car park, where the street lamps had all been knocked out, they’d be answering to him. Needless to say, my car was never touched. In fact it was more likely to be polished than scratched.

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It was during one of our Friday night, early Saturday hours decants from the club, about six months in, that Scarface announced he had a present for me.

He went back into the club, and came back a minute or two later with a shoebox.

“Ere you go son,” Scarface said, “the missus gets a bit funny about me havin this in the house, so you look after it for me.”

I went to open the box.

“Don’t open it ‘ere,” he hissed, “take it home wiv ya.”

The drive home that night on the Great Cambridge Road out of London had me looking down at the box for the entire journey. Why I didn’t pull over and have a look, I have no idea. I’d learned a little bit about Scarface’s colourful background, you don’t get to earn a moniker like that, despite such a life-changing scar, without the universe delivering back what you dealt out, well, the East End universe at any rate.

All I was hoping was, that it wasn’t a shooter, as the gangsters might say. If Scarface’s missus didn’t want it in her house, I hardly think my leafy Hertfordshire parents would want it either. Besides, where would I hide it? I actually considered behind the rabbit hutch thinking it could go into Munchy’s straw, making sure from now on, I was the only one to clean him out each weekend.

“But you hate cleaning the hutch out,” my Mum might say.

“Oh I don’t mind Mum, you take a weight off and I’ll mow the lawn for dad while I’m about it.”

It turned out, to be a shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray, infamous London gangster. They were to Scarface as far as I could work out, although some could have been for other members of maybe a gang, perhaps the gang, or the inner fraternity of their business interests.

A graphologist would no doubt have a lot to say about the increasingly slanted handwriting, which seemed to stay neatly and obediently within the lines, ironically not something that was echoed by his life, unless his he was with him mum, Violet. He was polite, letters always started with dear as a salutation, and he seemed to, from memory, mention home cooking and food a lot, and cardigans. I do remember he’d miss words out, which became a bit of a deciphering exercise at times, and here and there, he’d get busy with big capital letters, which lent an angry feel to his prose. Remind you of anyone?

The box resided on my desk in my bedroom, hardly hidden away, for weeks, and I was fascinated by the letters within, reading them probably every night. They were certainly not something that would withstand the damp of Munchy’s hay store in the back garden.

It was only a matter of time, before it was investigated by prying eyes, when the cleaning squad aka my Mum took the hoover on a mission through my bedroom while I was out.

And so we return to the first words of part one of this piece.

“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.

I returned the box that Friday night to Scarface, sharing the truth of my Mum’s flying squad find.

“You nutter,” he said. “Should’ve hidden ‘em away. They’ll be worth a fortune one day.” And he snatched them out of my hands.

I had no idea, this had been Scarface’s idea of a gift, or investment, as he clearly thought of this box full of letters from one of England’s most notorious criminals. And he wasn’t wrong. I did some cursory research, and that box could have been worth an easy five-figure number.

At this moment, perhaps one of you might be thinking, or asking, “Well, what was his name? Scarface, that is. I’m sure he wasn’t called Scarface.”

And you’d be right, this mystery man who’d been facially striped as it was known, who ‘looked after me’ for two years and gifted me a box that could have been historically and financially important, was indeed mentioned by his first name, a name it turns out was connected to some of the more interesting times during the Krays’ 60s crime spree.

I’d tell you, of course, but to use the words often used during that time, in that part of London, so as not to attract the claw-hammer knee-capping, chivving or striping activities of one Ronnie Kray and his brother Reggie, “I ain’t no grass.”

As a footnote, YouTube has been doing its usual thing over the last few days, since I’d been researching a little more about the Krays and their quite literal death grip over the capital.

Ronnie died in March 1995, having had a heart attack at Broadmoor, and Reggie was brought out of prison in handcuffs to attend the funeral. Thousands lined the streets of the East End for a horse-drawn cortege through Bethnal Green, the kind of send-off normally reserved for heads of state or beloved entertainers, which tells you something fairly pointed about how the public had decided to remember a man who had, amongst other things, shot someone in the head in a pub in front of witnesses and seemed to find the whole experience rather satisfying. Actually, the story goes that he went home to his Mum’s house immediately afterwards for tea and cake.

There’s a YouTube video that includes news reports from the day of Ronnie’s funeral. One of the men interviewed in the wake at the Blind Beggar pub, still open today, a man called Frankie, where that infamous shooting happened, says on camera, “Well, they were good guys, they were good gangsters really.” He goes on to say, “They wouldn’t harm women or children, because they were untouchable.”

Oh that’s alright then Frankie, or should I call you by your name from the time, ‘Mad Frankie Fraser,’ known to pull teeth from his victims during acts of torture, who lived to be 90, although nearly half those years were spend ‘doing porridge,’ at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

The eulogies at Ronnie Kray’s funeral and the general street-corner consensus that day leaned heavily on the Robin Hood mythology, the unlocked doors, the looking after your own, the code, all of it polished up and presented as though the inconvenient business of the extreme violence, torture, extortion and fear, had simply been mislaid somewhere between the flowers and the horse brasses.

I watched the footage available from that day, which is a bit grim, to close this chapter of the story.

Interesting when I look back at those attending, including celebs and a sprinkling of gangsters, old-school and modern. I don’t see Eggy anywhere. I guess you need something scarier as a name, really, and Mad Frankie Fraser was clearly taken.

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“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.

I was somewhat confused and taken aback at that moment, because this was a box of writings I thought he might be interested in, for what was written and how it was written, these almost childlike pencil scratches on prison-headed paper.

Pic: Ye Jinghan

Dad talked about London from the war years onwards a reasonable amount, so I thought at the very least my special shoebox of handwritten letters from one of the city’s most notorious gangsters might pique his interest, over this unexpected fury.

It was 1986, and the notorious Ronnie Kray, brother to Reggie, had been serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for seventeen years, two less than I’d been alive, and seven of the latter in a maximum secure hospital called Broadmoor, having been certified insane.

I should fill you in, as the Krays probably said to a few hapless victims of their violence, as to why letters ending with “from your friend Ronnie” were causing such concern for my dad. But this story, this memory, has come to mind for three reasons, really.

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One of my first employees, during the short moments I’ve felt grown up enough to actually hire people, was someone called Emma. We worked together in a business called The Radio School, training tomorrow’s broadcast talent to understand the process of applying for work in an industry which leaned on large helpings of right-place-right-time luck, sprinklings of nepotism, self-confidence and a stark inability to read the words “we have nothing right now but will keep your letter on file in case the right opportunity comes along” as a terminal rendition of “thanks but no thanks.”

To me, Emma has always been known as Prim, as in prim and proper. There’s no steering the Bentley away from this, but she is, I would say, my poshest friend, always so elegantly turned out, even in dog walker scruffs, lives in that house Blur sang about, and she’s exceptionally well spoken with friends who have names like Otilie, Hugo, Clementine and Rupert.

She’s writing a novel at the moment, as it goes, and last week, on a catch-up dog walk, I was permitted to read the opening chapter, before the publisher has even turned a page.

It’s bloody good work and actually, I feel privileged to be featured in this book, based on real-ish events, as a character named Jamie. There’s a particular brevity to my appearance, a Halfway to Maybe man would have it no other way, and I’m written out by chapter two.

The storyline is mostly about the employers that come after, who are a little bit wide boy, a little bit ooh, and a little bit ahh. You need to read that in an EastEnders cockney timbre.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that they are or were a Kray kind of set-up, but the stories and colourful language of this novel could take the pearls clean off a duchess, and my friend Prim walked right into that world with a firm handshake and no idea of what “Sort it aht, Bird, or I’ll give you some Adrian” actually meant.

Secondly, I’ve been editing an in-vision interview with a photographer called John Swannell, a British portrait and fashion photographer, famous for photographing members of the royal family, including Diana, Princess of Wales and the late Queen Elizabeth II. He started out assisting at Vogue and for David Bailey before building his own client list of the rich and very famous.

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We’ve arrived at the part in the edit where he recounts meeting the Krays at Bailey’s studio. I’ll save the details for the film, but in essence, John remembers escaping through a window in a building where they were working, to save himself from the advances of one Ronnie Kray.

The stars are clearly aligning, because, and this is the third reason behind the piece, my eldest Jack asked me over the weekend who the Krays were. Oddly, with all this happening, YouTube (tell me it’s not snooping in an omnipotent fashion) started serving up clips from the film Legend, which tells the story of the twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran organised crime across the East End of London through the 1950s and ‘60s with a combination of charm, community loyalty, and a capacity for extreme violence that made them almost impossible to challenge.

They were celebrities as much as criminals, photographed with politicians and pop stars, welcomed into nightclubs they probably half-owned anyway, loved, loathed and feared in equal measure.

People of a particular generation would suggest they looked after London in a fashion akin to a kind of Robin Hood figure, that old people could leave their doors unlocked, that nobody nicked from their own, and that there was a code of sorts, however brutal the hands that enforced it.

Reggie was the more calculated of the two, the one who could read a room and knew when to turn the menace up or down. Ronnie was a different matter entirely. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which his solicitors would later lean on heavily, but the clinical label doesn’t quite capture what made him so genuinely frightening. He didn’t lose his temper — that would almost have been reassuring.

No, Ronnie was cold, unpredictable in a way that had nothing to do with drink or provocation, and he seemed to enjoy the fear he generated as much as anything else.

One moment he’d be saying something quite amusing, the next he’d be caving the side of your head in with a claw hammer.

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People around him never quite knew which version they were getting, and that uncertainty was, for a very long time, what kept everyone in line.

Even when the Krays were banged up, as they say, you’d have found, as I did, that mum and dad’s generation still felt awkward at the very mention of either of the brothers, as if just the mere use of their surname could somehow magic them back. They were, I suppose, the Voldemort of their time.

So, this box. A shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray.

Aged 19, I worked as a DJ for a while at a club in Waltham Abbey, a part of London. Actually, it’s more a part of Essex, but it’s one of those places that feels like it wants to lay claim more to being allied to the smoke than a leafier part of the south east.

This was a small nightclub tucked into a corner of an estate of tower block flats. Dark red brick buildings, as I remember. Very much a part of 1960s soulless architecture, but not characterful enough to be granted brutalist status.

It was leased by a man called John, a short, dark-haired, chain-smoking man with a gruff voice and disarming demeanour, and try as I might, using all the powers of search, AI and otherwise, I have not been able to trace this club, him, or indeed the tower blocks it was part of. I suspect they’re long gone, and whilst the 1980s seem only a short time ago, I think they were possibly knocked down twenty-five-plus years ago.

The club was on the ground floor, reached by steps leading down from a snooker club. I’d answered a small 3x1 ad in a local newspaper: “Wanted: DJ for weekends, residency position. Auditions being held. Apply to 01 something something etc etc.”

Funny to think ads only had call for the space needed to contain a telephone number.

I rang, having only DJ’d with a makeshift disco unit made from a mahogany sideboard since the age of 16 or 17, for friends’ parties and a pub in Hertford that I wasn’t old enough to order a beer in.

“Come in Saturday afternoon,” said the voice on the end of the phone.

Do you remember how we used to find places before sat nav? This club was properly hidden away in the middle of a very depressed-looking area, and the only place to park was out the back in an alleyway that by day was scary enough, I could only imagine what it might be like at kicking out time when darkness enveloped the space. I arrived thirty minutes late, after searching for the place, figuring out the parking and then working a route back through the estate to the front door.

“You’re an hour late,” grumbled a man who unbolted the door to let me in.

I went to answer that it was only thirty minutes, but he turned the moment I started to talk and motioned me to follow him.

The club’s brutally harsh fluorescent lighting stripped every bit of mystery from the room. Spaces like this are almost unrecognisable from what they become after dark, all the illusion gone, just sticky carpet and the ghosts of a thousand Saturday nights.

I’d been DJing in pubs on and off for a couple of years by that point, so I knew the smell well enough: every known tobacco brand had worked itself into the soft furnishings like it had barbs, and underneath all of it something sweeter and harder to name, cheap aftershave or perfume, probably. Stale lager had soaked into the red and white striped carpet; it had lost all its bounce, and the walls looked like they’d last seen a paintbrush a decade back, easily. There were booths (another tone of red) that looked like areas prying eyes wouldn’t be able to peer into easily, and a DJ unit cloaked in that puffy, studded black leather.

Standing waiting were two men: John, the owner, and another man, similar height, a bit stockier, suit-clad with no tie, in his 50s, possibly 60s, sporting a long scar that ran from just next to his right eye down his face to his chin. It was an old scar, but I could see the depth, or at least, in some sense, feel it. When, as a photographer, I describe a face as lived-in or storied, this is what I mean. He looked like he’d been twelve rounds with life and was ready to do another twelve just for the sh*ts and giggles.

I felt like I’d walked onto a film set.

The owner greeted me first.

“I’m John, you’re late. But I still have a slot, that’s if you’re any good. This is my head of door. You might need him from time to time, that’s if you’re any good.”

I shook John’s hand. Then I shook the other man’s hand.

He squeezed mine back and held the grip uncomfortably long. He smiled, that confident, menacing smile that only a man with a long scar on his face and what looked like a cauliflower ear on the opposing side of his head could muster.

“Hello,” he said, with a deep, resonant 50-a-day London/Essex accent, the sort of tone that also suggested he ate razor blades for breakfast.

“I think you and I are gonna get on just fine.”

“If he’s good enough,” John chirped in.

“Nah, he’ll be alright. I’m gonna look after you,” he said, or threatened. I couldn’t quite work out which.

“I’m Neale,” I mumbled. “You are?”

“Scarface,” said the man. “That’s what you can call me. Scarface.”

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“Why don’t you call it, F**k it Friday,” she suggested, trying to be helpful, I’m sure, when I shared my thoughts with a friend about where to take the Friday edition of this Halfway to Maybe thing.

Pic: Jametlene Reksp

The Halfway to Maybe person would probably think; “That is not a bad idea,” but wrestle with it on account of the policy I have where I blank out the saucy words as my gran would say, and some of the power of the alliteration might well be lost.

Many years ago, I worked at a radio station where the controller banged on incessantly about the importance of having features on your show, things you could signpost, where people thought, “Oh, now I don’t wanna miss that, I like The Monday Moanline, so I’ll just make myself another cuppa and stay in for the day.”

He insisted that all features alliterate, so your hook became a kind of earworm, once heard, never forgotten. Easy to remember. Simple, irreverent, and everyone remembers irreverence, apparently, according to him and those horrible focus groups.

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I came up with Monday Mayhem, a sort of travel report on steroids to start the week, Trivia Tuesday, obviously a quiz, and Throwback Thursday, a lazy music feature where people got to choose three songs that were essentially just old. Not big, not clever, but it alliterated, and the boss appreciated that facet of the creative process.

I filled up the week in the end, although I can’t remember what Wednesday or Friday was at the moment, and actually, I was quite proud of them until one of those darned aforementioned focus groups, essentially twenty people in a room having free tea and milk chocolate Hobnobs, claiming a five pounds voucher to shop at the Savacentre whilst they were about it, decided to lay into my little show one meeting.

In a very early case of fact-checking, one person had identified a clutch of answers to my quiz that weren’t correct, and another suggested the golden oldies music feature called Throwback Thursday might as well be retitled ThrowUP Thursday, because the music chosen was always terrible. Actually, in the report, the word used was something more anatomical.

F**k it Friday, was the idea of taking the ball and just running with it in another direction, as far away as possible from the light Ladybird book Friday philosophy I sometimes offer up.

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I suppose the Fffff of F**k it does alliterate well with Friday, certainly as well as the Phhhh of philosophy, but I was thinking more along the lines of Freeform Friday, something where my gran wouldn’t have spat out her tea over her Roberts Radio. See? That alliterates. For all my life, I imagined a Mr Roberts, some bearded gentleman, for whatever reason, inventing a radio that was classic, and covered in different coloured leatherettes. Turns out it may just have been the alliteration. I shall have to go and look that one up.

So features. What about a Friday feature? For this podcast?

I thought of The Art of the Untruth as a play on the Art of the Deal, or the Art of the Undeal, as one political commentator mused this week, though fear not, this is not one about politics, otherwise we could be here until Stupefied Sunday.

No, this is more about the fibs passed off as the truth, ones that hopefully don’t harm of course, and have an impish side to them on the part of the untruth teller.

I like the TV show Would I Lie to You? I could do something similar about all the funny fake news stuff that’s flying around, although I’m not sure I could tell the stories well enough.

Sam, my wife, says I am too easy to read in this department, a reason why I have never been entered into the family poker tournament. My face is not so much a readable book but a town crier in a bright red, two-sizes-too-large tabard, in the middle of the market square, with a very loud bell.

My story about Mum, earlier this week, is a case in point.

When she tried to make me drink coffee as a child, poured from a flask during those refuelling stops on a long, gruelling holiday cliffside walk, she passed it off as CoffeeTea, when I protested I only liked tea. Mum made coffee you could stand a stick in, which works as a small cup of whatever that Turkish coffee is that you can use in place of cement, but not as a flask full.

You see, CoffeeTea is silly and probably impish, isn’t it? Or is it just a big fat Whopper, minus the cheese?

I’ve recounted before enjoying the last moment we could properly tease our kids, turning the gullibility counter up to number 11, when I told them — driving over the brow of a hill and seeing the coast for the first time on a summer holiday — how lucky they were that they got to see the world in colour.

“Yeah, we only had black and white in my day, colour wasn’t invented until 1971. All this was black and white once.”

“What, Dad? Really?”

“Yeah, really! The sea — that was grey-ish black, the sky the same, everything you see for as far as you can see was black and white.”

“I’m really pleased I wasn’t young when you were, Dad,” and with that went the last moment I was ever able to josh in that manner, because later on, when they were still asking me questions about what colour the cars were, and if the fish and chips were black and white too, I let on that I was teasing, and they had become wily enough at that point to question my future April Fools’ jokes on any day of the year.

I still grin when I see the sea for the first time if I drive to the coast, and I replay the joke in my mind over and over.

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I miss those days of being able to lightly tease our kids, and I think in a world that’s currently in a state of readiness due to so-called fake news and AI, there’s a chance our ability to have fun with language and slightly stretchy reality could atrophy. Are we about to lose the ability to tell a story?

There’s a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to lying, which probably tells you something about how much humans enjoy doing it, or at least thinking about it. Philosophers tend to draw a line, sometimes a very firm one, between the lie and the fib, though they rarely call it a fib, because philosophers don’t really do impish.

Immanuel Kant, obviously research helped me here, I can’t lie, like I would know Immanuel Kant. Anyway, he was the sort of man who would absolutely not have enjoyed CoffeeTea, because he took the hardest possible line.

I feel I should have known him, and the philosophers in the room are undoubtedly tutting, because IK, to his friends, is considered one of the most important philosophers who ever lived, which is quite a billing. Every day is a school day.

Lying, he argued, was wrong in every circumstance, without exception. Even if a murderer knocked on your door asking where your friend was hiding, you had a moral duty to tell the truth. The friend’s fate was not your moral responsibility. The lie was. This may explain why everybody looked the other way when he came into the pub, and nobody was his friend on Facebook, despite the fact he died in 1804.

On the other side of the argument sits another philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who would have been much more relaxed about the whole business. If the outcome of a lie produces more happiness, or prevents more harm, than the truth would — well then, John would say weigh the whole thing up.

But none of this really covers what my mum did with the coffee, or what I did with the sea. Those aren’t lies in any philosophical sense. I think they’re something else, a kind of collaborative fiction, where the joy is partly in the telling but mostly in the moment it unravels.

I think the pleasure of the black and white world story isn’t the deception; it’s the look on a child’s face when the world briefly makes a different kind of sense, and surely there’s no harm in it.

There’s actually something generous in it, because I’ve just handed them a story they’ll carry around with them. They still mention black-and-white fish and chips, after all.

On Tuesday this week, I photographed a wedding, and during that time in the afternoon when I, with the videographer, had disappeared for fifteen minutes with the bride and groom to grab a few nice portraits, we found ourselves in a sort of secret garden, part of the wonderful estate hosting the wedding. It’s a place I know quite well actually, but the videographer hadn’t been there in his life.

He commented that the loud birdsong was lovely, which given the showers and time of day I thought seemed a little strange.

“Ha,” I feigned choking, “That’s not real, it’s piped into the garden through speakers. Look, up there,” I said, pointing to a bat box.

I kept a straight face, but not for long enough. He saw the curling of my lips and realised he’d been done. Had I found my poker face, I reckon he’d have left that venue that night, looking for bat box speakers in every venue’s secret garden from that moment on.

Somehow we got onto the subject of Disney, but my cover had been blown, and he wasn’t about to believe that staff paint the flowers more vibrant colours before guests enter the park each morning.

I think I’ve clearly lost my touch, and a life of seriousness awaits, living on Immanuel Kant’s moral high ground, high enough to cause a nosebleed.

Although I wasn’t to be beaten, and yesterday morning on my riverside dog walk with my best four-legged buddy, as we came back down a path we often take that runs adjacent to a piece of land recently acquired by a well-heeled fishing club, a grumpy-looking gent was poking at the high entry gate that was installed about a month back, with a number code.

“I used to like walking in there,” he bemoaned, as I passed by.

“It was amazing woodland.”

“Oh, it’s private now,” I said.

“I can see that,” he snapped, “and it’s bloody wrong. This is a bloody nature centre. We should be able to go and sit anywhere we like round here.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’d like what’s going on in there these days,” I countered.

“Why?”

“Apparently it’s Thatcham’s naturist woodland. If you go in — and you can get a code for that gate from the centre — you’ll have to leave your clothes in a locker, though you can keep your shoes or boots on.”

“What?” he spluttered.

“I’m not going bloody naked for anyone. Why don’t they go down to Brighton like all the rest of them?”

With that he stormed off, and I’m convinced he’ll be down at the Swan spreading the news. Perhaps I just started one of those local, hopefully harmless rumours.

Or perhaps he secretly went back later, when I wasn’t there, and asked for the number combination.

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“Your trouble,” said Sam, my wife, “is that you’re not northern enough.”

“What do you mean, not northern enough?” I barked back, with a fair level of indignation thrown in to season my reply.

We were talking about podcasters, and comedians, and actors, and writers, and… she had a point.

Perhaps, I thought, that’s been the halfway, in my maybe?

Pic: Danylo Supran

Had my voice been more interesting, and exotic, not anchored firmly in what we call the home counties of England, or the Shires, my expression may have registered more in the, ‘he’s got something funny, or odd, or interesting to say’ department, rather than the other kind of department more likely to hire you to voice an advert for the latest government’s ‘pay your tax on time’ campaign.

Your voice, how you use it, and where you use it, fascinates me.

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This will be a bit UK-centric for a moment, but every nation will have, I’m sure, similar vocal nuances, so you’ll not be left behind.

Where I sit in the UK, we generally speak in a fairly flatline way, although I don’t entirely mean in terms of intonation.

Slightly south and a few footsteps east from where I grew up, the Essex accent grabs you by the wotsits, and you essentially become a London cabbie who has an issue with the other side of the River Thames.

“I’m not goin’ soooooooufff of the river mate, not nooooow.”

I find it hard to determine where Essex becomes proper London, and where my attempts at accents start to make everyone sound like an East End gangster from the 60s.

“I come ‘ere for a proper shoot ouuut with proper men.”

But we also had accents not far from our door, where country twang took over, and only an hour and a half north and a few steps to the west, you get close enough to the Midlands that saying “I’d like a chicken Korai,” is less like something off the actual menu, and more like you’re fluent in Black Country parlance.

We have a comedian in the UK called Peter Kay from Bolton near Manchester, who has, I think, funny bones in his voice, if that’s at all possible.

If I say the words, garlic bread, it’s not funny in the slightest. When he says it, it’s a vocal doorway to comedy gold. He’ll build a complete set out of saying those words.

The Big Yin, from Scotland, Billy Connolly, is another good case in point. If he were in the witness box to support the argument Sam is making, your jury wouldn’t even need to consult.

Partly it’s the rhythm of Glasgow speech itself, it has a natural musicality and directness that lends itself perfectly to comedy. Billy will drop into really broad Glaswegian at exactly the right moment for emphasis, or to land a punchline, and then pull back again. He also has that thing where the voice goes up at the end of a sentence in a way that makes everything sound slightly incredulous, like the world is constantly surprising him and he can’t quite believe what he’s witnessing, and you’re along with him, on the ride.

There’s equally something about Scottish swearing that just sounds funnier than English swearing, it has more texture to it somehow. Billy is a genius, and to think he could have spent a lifetime building ships instead.

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Of course we do have southerners that buck the trend, like internationally renowned Jimmy Carr, but then he has an exotic odd laugh, and that kind of rescues him, certainly from making adverts about paying your tax on time, though for those who remember, that’s probably not a gig he’s ever likely to get.

Of course once upon a time, standard southern English or received pronunciation was considered ‘talking proper like,’ and you almost needed no other credentials.

Take it back to the 40s and 50s, and you have Pathé news reels, where the announcer was contractually obliged to always have a plum in his mouth and make everything sound rather jolly even when it wasn’t.

“There’s Mr Turnley Hooper, the Little Puddlington-on-Sniff grocer, polishing his ‘Closing Down’ sign as though it were just another splendid bargain!”

My friend Mali sent me something yesterday I’d not seen before. It was for an event called Spit Nights, which sounds like the sort of place Mr Turnley Hooper might hang out in with his conservative club mates, but no, this is poetry, open mic poetry.

Let me explain. It’s half poetry, half organised chaos sometimes, brilliantly so, and you’ll hear voices from every corner going at it with rhythm and bite; suddenly the bloke who sounds like he’s stepped out of Newcastle steals the room from someone speaking perfectly polished Queen’s English.

It turns out a bit of an accent gives the words some grit, and the idea of music noodling in the background makes it even better.

But I noticed something, accents were melding, north, south, east and west, beginning to coexist in the same sentence. The Essex folk were purloining the fine accent from Bolton, pouring in a dab of West Country, then finding further roots in a country they’d probably only ever seen in travel posts.

But it worked, and I was hooked, and I now want to go to a Spit Night, which still sounds like the sort of thing that Mr Turnley Hooper would go to at the Little Puddlington-on-Sniff conservative club, Tuesday nights only.

That phrase the grass is always greener is suggestive of a rather finite way of being or existing. You’re on one side with your metaphorical hardened grass tufts, dandelions and patches of mud where the dog has a wee every day, and there’s Mr Turnley Hooper with his fine green baize that’s won Little Puddlington-on-Sniff’s best village lawn three years in a row.

And then you remember he’s shutting his grocery store because the big MegaMart Hyper Barn has opened on the A34, with its 3000 free parking spaces and as many free refills of caramel and coffee as your kidneys can take. His grass is not necessarily greener.

So perhaps the Spit Night’s parade of pro poets and first timers on stage have got it right. Perhaps being slightly more chameleon with your thoughts and approach is a kindlier way to feel about you, your life and your outlook.

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And maybe that’s what we miss, while we’re busy staring at everyone else’s lawn too.

Mr Turnley Hooper is back there in Little Puddlington-on-Sniff, polishing his closing-down sign, looking out at the A34 and wondering what it must be like to have three thousand parking spaces and as many coffee refills as your kidneys can stand. He doesn’t hear the bell on his door the way you do when you walk in. He doesn’t see what you see.

We spend an enormous amount of time, years probably, if you added it up, convinced that the more interesting version of things is happening just over there. A bit further north. A different postcode. Someone else’s medium, someone else’s approach, someone else’s way of saying garlic bread.

And all the while, someone is looking at your patch of dandelions and dog-worn mud and thinking, privately, that they’d rather have that than the award-winning baize they’re forever having to maintain.

Whatever metaphorical grass you’re admiring on the other side of whatever kind of fence, be that creative, sporting, a job that involves the wearing of a suit; there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending too long trying to be a different version of yourself. Let’s not get all dramatic, darling, I mean the low-level kind, the sort that accumulates in the background while you’re getting on with everything else, but it’s still there.

Most of us, I would imagine, do it for years without really noticing. Convinced that somewhere out there is a better frequency to be broadcasting on, if we could just find the dial.

And the pertinent thing, when you eventually stop fiddling with it, if you’ll pardon an awkward pun that may have piqued Mr Turnley Hooper’s curiosity, is that the signal was pretty decent all along. You just had the volume down.

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“But do I really HAVE to go to Sunday School?” I moaned, or something very similar, I mean, it’s a long time ago.

Pic: Shane

“Why don’t you want to go?” Mum countered. “All your friends are going.”

“No, they’re not. None of them are there. And we have to sing hymns.”

“Well, you’ve got a lovely voice, darling. I think you should at least try it.”

“For how long?”

“Maybe another term?”

“Another term! But that’ll be Christmas, and that’s ages away!”

When you’re in single digits, one school term can feel like a decade.

“Oh, go on with you, I think it’s good to make friends.”

“But I’ve got friends. I don’t need any more.”

Mum could be stubborn, as indeed could I, childhood lessons from an expert in the pastime, me thinks?

“Honestly, do until Christmas, and then you get to go on the trip.”

“What trip?”

Mum wanted me to follow whatever norm or crowd she’d prescribed to, I clearly had other ideas.

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Equally, she’d clearly tired of this attempted negotiation by an eight or nine-year-old, and relied upon something like a made-up trip to pique my curiosity. This was another one of her baseless claims when she couldn’t think of an actual reason or argument. Reality went right out the window in what I suppose these days we’d call fake news or something.

Her greatest fake news, which seems small fry now but at the time used to agitate me greatly, was when we went walking as a family on holiday and we’d stop along a cliff path in the middle of nowhere, halfway to maybe as it goes, and out would come a snack, usually a mint chocolate Jacob’s Club biscuit (remember those, kids?), and a red tartan flask that was still in her possession when she died many years later, with three plastic cups: orange, blue, and a sort of purple colour.

In each, she’d pour a hot drink, and I’d pray for tea, as I couldn’t stand the bitter taste of the strong coffee she made.

“Oh no, Mum, is that coffee?”

“No, it’s tea.”

“Well, it smells like coffee, Mum.”

Dad would look the other way, avoiding teagate altogether.

“Well, I can tell you it isn’t, darling,” Mum would sharply argue.

“What is it then?”

“It’s coffee-tea.”

“Coffee-tea?!”

And so this was repeated until I was in my teens, and my taste buds had been beaten into submission.

Fortunately, my whinging ways removed me from Sunday School with far less than a term to go. I think this tête-à-tête is one of my earliest memories. Why must it be this, I don’t know. But if I meet my maker with this story, I can’t imagine the divine maker of all things being particularly impressed by Sunday School draft dodging.

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That stubborn little kid never really went away, if I’m honest.

He just got older, started talking into a microphone for a living, then carried a camera, and got paid for asking awkward questions.

I knew how to go my own way.

But I don’t think going your own way is exclusively the territory of artists and freelancers and people who work from kitchen tables in their dressing gowns.

Some of the most singular people I’ve ever met have spent thirty years inside the same organisation, and done it entirely on their own terms. It’s less about what you do and more about whether you’ve ever stopped to ask: Is this actually mine, or am I just going along with it?

Photography taught me something about this, certainly not immediately, and not in any blinding flash of revelation. More like the way a photograph itself works, i.e. you don’t always see what you’ve actually got until you look at it later, in different light.

I started making and taking pictures because I was intrigued by what I saw when the film came back, as it was when I started.

I’ll be honest with you, and I’ll whisper these words to a degree: in case any of those early clients were listening, there was no plan, no strategy, nobody telling me it could become anything. And because of that, I made every mistake available to me, in whatever order I fancied. I was winging it.

But they were my mistakes. And that, it turns out, matters more than I would have thought at the time.

The coffee-tea years don’t last forever, thankfully, and I mean that quite literally as much as anything else.

At some point, something just clicks, if you’ll pardon my photographic pun. Not dramatically, not in a way you’d necessarily notice at the time. More like you catch yourself mid-nod, going along with something, and for the first time you actually stop and think, hang on, do I even want this? And instead of talking yourself out of that thought, as you’ve probably done a hundred times before, you just... follow it somewhere.

It might be something enormous, or it might be what you order for lunch.

You realise you don’t need to follow the crowd, you can go your own way. My father-in-law, for example, always orders after his wife, because he chooses the same.

“I’ll have what you’re having, dear,” he’ll say.

It’s become a bit of a game, really, because I can see my mother-in-law plotting as the order goes in.

She orders something, and he orders the same. She shuts the menu. Then, as the waiter is walking away, she calls him back.

“Oh, sorry, I’ve just changed my mind, can I have the ‘X’ instead?”

I’m not trying to out my father-in-law, the chances he’ll ever hear this are as likely as me ‘insert wildly implausible moment’ here.

We follow the crowd instinctively, for all manner of reasons, for ease, for vindication, for applause, for safety, for love, for safe harbour, for lack of imagination, for fear of offence, for… we could be here a long time.

And I’ve done it in my creative life, with radio, with photography. I spent years wondering whether what I was making was good enough, valid enough, the right kind of thing, before eventually getting bored with that particular anxiety and just getting on with it, mistakes and all.

I suppose as the show now officially becomes called HALFWAY TO MAYBE, formerly Reflections, that’s what this piece is about.

Nobody handed me a certificate. I just decided, one fairly unremarkable afternoon, that I probably knew what I was doing. More or less. And I’ve been making glorious wins and f**k ups ever since.

Self-belief, I’ve come to think, is not the thing it’s sold as. It’s not a switch you find and flip. It’s not a destination you arrive at and then unpack your bags. It’s more like, and forgive me for a photographic cliché, it’s more like a photograph you’re still developing.

You can see something emerging, something that looks like it might be good, but you’re not entirely sure yet, and the worst thing you can do is pull it out too early and ruin it by undercooking it.

What I do know is that the moments I’ve trusted my own instincts, even when they’ve made no obvious sense, those have been the moments I’m most glad of. Not always because they worked out brilliantly, because honestly, sometimes they didn’t. But because they were genuinely mine.

A very good friend of mine, you know who you are, and I know you’ll be listening, because I shamelessly told you this was partly about you today, has just parted company with his full-time, pay-me-at-the-end-of-the-month, company-pension life.

His last day at the firm ended with a short laptop exchange, like something out of a Bond movie where he hands the detonation codes over to the person stroking an evil-looking feline, in exchange for a modest whip round from the office, and a Marks and Spencer’s sandwich, and then, he was gone, wondering what the f-stop he’d just done. It’s similar to a story of mine I might share one day, the only suited job I’d ever had.

But he’s free. Free now to go his own way, in his case, creativity. I think there’s a sense of wonder and awe that he’s now his own boss, mixed with the terrifying realisation that he could end up hunched over a sticky table in some Montmartre café that smells of Gauloises and existential dread, surrounded by other people who used to have pensions, all nursing a single glass of house red, collectively bemoaning the fact that nobody understands their art, and at least one of them is seriously considering whether an ear is a price worth paying for posterity.

That eight-year-old in the Sunday School negotiation didn’t have a strategy. He just knew, somewhere, that this particular path wasn’t his. And he said so, repeatedly, until someone believed him. Or got tired of arguing. Either way.

I’m still doing more or less the same thing, just with better vocabulary and occasionally a decent lens.

As for go your own way, there is a slight aside to this. It’s the name of a Fleetwood Mac song from the album Rumours, which my first real love bought for me the day we split.

You never forget that first heartache, do you? Like a first exquisite red wine, that first exquisitely painful heartbreak will never be tasted with equal palpable feeling. She’d marked that track on the album sleeve with a thick black marker pen, which at the time seemed rather gratuitously cruel to me. Perhaps uncalled for.

I didn’t take the record out of the sleeve for a long, long time, but when I did, out came a note, which had the words, ‘I still believe in you, now you just need to believe in yourself too.”

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There’s been a theme, I think, this week about self-belief, and so I’m rounding it off with some thoughts similarly thrown in that direction, and I’ll get there through a story from my youth.

It’ll be obvious I have altered a name slightly in this story, but I’m hoping what I have chosen signals the character perfectly.

Pic: Museums Victoria

When I made the leap from small-town primary school to county-town secondary school, or high school, I suppose, in other languages, it was somewhat of a shock to the system.

My Mum and Dad seemed keen for me to attend the all-boys school in the town. A newly appointed comprehensive education school, it had only just made its own giant leap from being an established grammar school, with a history dating back to 1617.

409 years. William Shakespeare was still alive, James I was on the throne, the first monarch to rule both England and Scotland, the black death was still haunting cities and in educational terms, education was largely limited to boys, often tied to the church.

The school had a proud history of academic and sporting achievements. Historical figures had attended like Alfred Russel Wallace attended, he was the naturalist and evolutionary thinker parallel to Charles Darwin, our house was named after him, house in school that is. Bishops, authors, sportsmen, and later Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in Harry Potter.

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There was a sense of pride in our house that I’d made the cut and could attend this school built from bricks nearly as old as Hogwarts, well not quite, but give me some poetic licence.

But as I joined, we were in transition from grammar to comprehensive modern, a private school if you will in many ways if you want to think of it that way, to one run by the state and some of the teachers, or masters as they liked to be known, thought this to be a dumbing down period, and weren’t keen at all!

My year was a year of students that, in some of those masters’ eyes and thoughts, had magicked their way into a scenario that they weren’t worthy of, and one caped teacher still from 1617 I think took the opportunity to prove his point by getting us all to sit what was called the eleven plus exam.

The eleven-plus was an exam taken by children in England and Wales at age 10 or 11, usually in their final year of primary school.

Its job was simple and brutal: decide what kind of secondary education you were going to get.

If you passed, you went to a grammar school, which was academically focused and seen as the route to university and very fine professional careers. If you didn’t, you went to a secondary modern school, which tended to be more practical and, in reality, came with fewer qualifications and opportunities. That’s not strictly true of course, but this is the way in which it was viewed.

The exam itself tested things like English, maths, logic, and verbal reasoning. Not what you knew, so much as how quickly and neatly your brain could jump through hoops on the day. This wasn’t a paper you were allowed to take again, but the results held a decision that could shape the rest of your life.

You’d take the exam, a letter would arrive, which would tell you very early on in your life what sort of person the system thought you were going to be.

I would imagine you have now in your mind visualised what kind of person would pass an eleven plus, so I’m going to read some names and you can tell me, in the secrecy of space only you and I are sharing, whether they passed or not. Just say yes or no.

Stephen Hawking.

David Attenborough.

Ricky Gervais.

Brian Cox.

David Beckham.

Richard Dawkins.

And Paul Gascoigne.

I appreciate some names you won’t be familiar with across the globe, but I would hazard a guess that Brits have picked out three names that fell at that hurdle.

But no, you’d be wrong, every one of those names passed this exam paper that purported to separate the wheat from the chaff in the education system.

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And so it came to pass that my classmates and I, on our first day in a Victorian glazed brick classroom, were getting a dressing down from the house tutor Mr Crotchley-Hardwhip, determined to prove some kind of point that many of us shouldn’t even be gracing his wooden chairs with our uneducated backsides.

He was a chippy man, who only seemed to have one volume, a rather aggressive tone and carried the look of resentment with consummate ease.

I don’t recall exactly what he said, of course, but having been there for two decades, he loathed the very principle of having to say he was a state school teacher, I imagine, in the pub each night.

He walked around the hushed classroom of nervous sprogs as we were indelicately referred to, passing out A4 sheets, with the words eleven and plus on the front.

In its classic form, you were usually looking at two to four papers, each lasting about 45 to 60 minutes. So in real terms, a child might spend two to three hours in total sitting tests, with short breaks in between.

Crotchley-Hardwhip had made a compilation of no doubt the more challenging questions, and this was what he was presenting.

“Boys, you have 30 minutes. Go.”

I turned mine over and started trying to answer maths, reasoning and English questions, casting my eye across the class to see if any of the other lads were scanning the air for some kind of divine intervention too.

It was clear what Hardwhip was doing. It was an army tactic, break ‘em bad, and then build ‘em back up again.

In the playground, during the next break, I looked for friends who had made the move to this school with me, but had been placed in other houses.

“How did you do?” I asked one of my friends, “Do you think you passed?”

“Passed what?” my friend Jon said to me.

“The eleven plus?”

“What?” He said.

“We didn’t do that, we took a walk around the school and went to the music block, where we all got a chance to play drums.”

(Pause)

The following day, Crotchley-Hardwhip, during morning assembly, stood up holding his lapels and with a self-satisfied, smug grin, announced we were all failures, which, considering some of that class went on to study at some of the most prestigious universities, can not possibly have been true.

But he didn’t choose to say this in a collective way, he called all of our names individually, following the announcement of our surname with FAIL.

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There was a spattering from memory of indignation mixed with self-satisfied pleasure as he picked names out, and occasionally, when he got to a particular name where, I don’t know, intel suggested they were actually an academic in waiting, he added the sound of surprise to the word FAIL.

Some of this, as the years have passed, I warn you I may have embellished slightly, but I do remember those two days, the test and the results.

I also remember him reading the names, being chastised for something I did NOT do.

I wasn’t the one who mockingly said FAIL, not so far under his breath that Crotchley-Hardwhip didn’t hear.

“What was that boy?” he spluttered, piercing my brain with a look that pretty much crumpled me in front of my classmates.

“Nothing sir, I didn’t say anything.”

“It’s always the same boy, you have nothing to say and nothing to offer this class with your mark. You stupid boy.”

It wasn’t the start I’d hoped for, and was definitely the commencement of a mutual loathing we had for each other for the next two years, and try as I might for it not to do so, it certainly knocked my confidence.

And then he left. He simply wasn’t there in September when my third year commenced. Usually there is an announcement that so and so would be leaving, but not Crotchley-Hardwhip, he simply buggered off, as the quaint expression goes.

It’s hard to pinpoint when confidence is knocked and how much effect something probably deemed trivial by some and no doubt funny by Hardwhip, actually has on a life.

But at that moment the wicked witch is dead to borrow a line from Oz.

Actually, Oz, is a pertinent way to end the story.

In The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow spends his entire journey convinced he lacks a brain. He defers, apologises, stands back. And yet, time and again, he’s the one solving problems, spotting danger, working things out. The wizard eventually hands him a certificate and calls it intelligence. It needed someone to notice.

And that, I think, has been the point of at least three of our features this week. Belief often lags behind evidence. We decide early on what we are, or what we’re not, usually because someone older, louder, or wearing a gown tells us so. The trouble is, like the Scarecrow, we can go a long way doing the thinking without ever quite trusting that it’s ours.

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In photography, the language of labels is used a lot. We put ourselves in labelled boxes, we’re portrait photographers, landscape shooters, street photographers and so on.

Labels labels labels. If we’re not categorising our genres, we’re categorising ourselves, hobbyist, semi-pro, pro, artist, personal… photography is full of labels that are all about identity.

Pic: Library of Congress

They tell other people where we think we belong, or where we want to be placed, and I have a story about labels and identity that I learned yesterday afternoon.

My Dad lived what you might call a bit of a Harry Potter existence, without the wizardry and ‘he who must not be named’. You know it was years until I realised Hermione was, Hermione. He slept, my Dad this is, under the stairs, at 7 Rowntree Road in a space I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to stretch out in, and whilst that sounds like the workings of a rather cruel upbringing at the hands of Uncle Vernon, it was actually to keep him safe, from the Doodlebugs.

Now this might sound like an awkward kind of clumsy insect, flying one at that, that you find on hot summer nights bumping into the pergola such is its wayward habit, and then dropping into your lazy summer long-drink as the sun goes down. It was infact anything but a benign flying insect for those who lived through the reign of its terror from 1944.

The doodlebug was the name people in Britain gave to the V-1 flying bomb, a pilotless weapon, and an early cruise missile, really, sent across the Channel in the latter years of the Second World War. It began appearing in the summer of 1944, arriving not in waves like earlier bombing raids but one at a time, which somehow made it worse.

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Now, I know this from the stories my father would tell, that you would hear the doodlebug before you saw it, this rough blurp blurp blurp blurp sounding engine, moving slowly enough to follow with your eyes. It wasn’t aimed with much care once it left the ramps in northern France. A basic system counted jet engine pulses and, when the blurp blurp blurp blurp count was reached, the engine stopped and the bomb fell wherever it happened to be. Most were meant for London, but plenty landed elsewhere.

When one hit, the blast could flatten houses across a wide radius, collapse nearby buildings, and shatter windows streets away. A direct hit in a built-up area could kill dozens in seconds; in open ground, it might leave simply a crater and little else.

What set the doodlebug apart wasn’t just the damage, though there was plenty of that, but the way it altered daily life. There were no long warnings, just that sound passing overhead and the waiting that followed once the engine cut out. As long as it was making sound you were okay, it was the silence that wrought fear.

People apparently, from what I gleaned last night when reading a little more about it, learned to pause mid-conversation, to stop walking, to hold their breath without really knowing they were doing it. Children grew up knowing the noise without fully understanding it, and babies were born while it was still part of the background.

Those children were later called doodlebug babies, not as a medical term or an official label, but as a way of marking time. It was a shorthand for saying, you were born into a world when the sky felt unreliable.

And so, that is why my Dad slept under the stairs in a tiny space shored up by railway sleepers that somehow my grandfather had found, although the very door that he used through which to enter and exit was just plywood of some kind, the type that was otherwise used in the kitchen, kitchen behind which sat the family’s crockery.

I’m not sure the door, that door, would have been adequate protection for the blast from an 850kg bomb. Neither would the oak table that his mum and dad, my nanny, and the grandad I never met, sleep under. But they didn’t like the public air-raid shelter in the park around the corner, or the one in the back garden that decades later I used to make dens in.

Nan said it was full of spiders and far too cold to sleep in, so an oak table it was in the front room, or parlour as it was known.

In that same room was a piano made by a Parisienne piano maker called Borg, like the famous tennis player, but not. The company name, Borg Pianos was inscribed inside the lid, I think in gold leaf, and Borg’s actual signature in pencil was inside the top lid to the left. The piano dated back to 1878 from memory.

It was from a time, I’m sorry to say, that ivory was used for the keys. It had ornate candlesticks on hinges for illuminating your sheet music in near dark, but as striking and well looked after as this upright piano was, parlour room damp had somehow affected the ability to ever tune it well, as well as age, it having been a passed down family heirloom, and the decorative struts at either end, had been replaced with something far plainer. They were removed to make table legs, although there only being two struts, I have no idea what the table used for the other two.

I always thought it would be worth a fortune, going by the date alone, but Paris at that time was producing pianos in greart numbers, and Borg was a small-scale piano maker or assembler, active in France in the second half of the 1800s, and rather than making his own original parts, often built his intruments using bought-in actions and components, which was very common at the time. Before the Internet came along, I’d not been able to find any of this out, and so my family heirloom with a dodgy but charming sounding middle C was destined simply to be something that would be passed down once more, to one of my kids.

I learned to play the piano on that instrument, did my grade 1 through 5 lessons and exams practise on it, proudly belted out The Entertainer on it, until in the early naughties, and stored in my parents-in-law’s garage, it was one day removed, sadly not to a home where once again it could be used to learn Moonlight Sonata on, but I fear as fodder for the large Biffa Dumpster in the sky, where old pianos strike their dodgy but charming sounding Middle C for the last time.

The reason I’m going on so much about the piano is that Nanny and Grandad pushed the oak table they slept under up to the wall on one side, and pulled the piano in to cocoon them opposite. A Borg piano and oak table their only protection as the Doodlebugs fell on their suburb of London.

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Yesterday afternoon, I was at a wake, in the course of my other job in life, a celebrant, and I found myself talking to Uncle Mick, who reached out his hand to shake mine and introduced himself as Uncle Mick, a Doodlebug Baby.

Whilst I’d heard of Doodlebugs, to hear it used as a way to describe a period of childbirth was interesting. I’d heard of Blitz babies, conceived during The Blitz of 1940–41. VE Day babies, of course World Cup babies, as we move into more celebratory seasons of conception. Lockdown or pandemic babies, of course, will be a generation yet to announce themselves in the years to come, but rewinding back to 1944, a Doodlebug baby?

Sometimes, I suppose, a label like this is or was locked into family lore, because wartime births often come with strong remembered details, shelters, disruptions, rationing, streets changed overnight, local history, especially if the family stayed in an area that was hit.

But there’s no register, no official heading in the census, no spike marked in a ledger somewhere. The V-1 attacks ran for months rather than years, and births were spread across that window and beyond it, which makes them hard to count and easy to mythologise. The phrase itself never became an authorised term either. It didn’t come from doctors, demographers, or the government. It came from people. From families trying to explain a beginning, and I find that fascinating.

Eighty-two years. I’d been working out the maths as I talk to him.

“Gone in a blink,” he said, “Gone in a blink.”

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Seeing never quite switching off is probably an apt way to start today’s edition, because that’s the theme of this short piece today.

My mate from the FujiCast podcast, Kev Mullins, and I were talking about social media of late and what he does and doesn’t like in terms of SM consumption, in terms of kids, this is, and TikTok was top of his ‘against the wall come the revolution’ list.

Pic: Shaun Day

“I can literally see their brains coming out of their ears,” he complained, as if this is something that afflicts only the young, but he knows, I know that this is a common thread now, which, but less than a generation ago, did not even exist. I don’t want to get all ‘drama darling’ about it, but could this be the pandemic nobody really thinks of as such?

I drilled down into the doom-scrolling habit and revealed:

Teenagers often scroll late at night. Content leans toward comparison. Looks, bodies, popularity, success. Confidence can be a casualty as can sleep.

Young adults (20s). Scroll between tasks. Feeds mix news, careers, lifestyles. Pressure to be “doing better” creeps in, with a side serving of anxiety, which is hard to switch off of course.

Adults (30s–40s). Scrolling, they say, feels a touch practical, but no less addictive. News, parenting, money, work. Bad headlines stack up fast in these scrolls, and stress is normalised.

Midlife (50s–60s). You see, us lot have reframed this as ‘staying informed’. Our eldest, Jack, is the first to scoff at me for this excuse. Politics, health stories, world events. Boy can I go off on one about what’s in the news and who’s done what to who.

Older adults (70+). Facebook dominates. Local news and community groups. This is the group most likely to believe and spread false information travels fast. The doom scrollers in this category have, in some departments, shaky trust.

The common thread, different ages, same-ish pull. The brain reacts to threat and novelty.

Scrolling oddly gives you the feeling you’re in charge, which I recoiled at when reading, but you know what, it’s bloody true.

Monday night, the man who keeps me from climbing walls and repeating Shakespeare sonnets backwards, Neil Ford, an IT superhero in plain clothing came across to just go through stuff, and let me level with you here, check that I haven’t been changing settings on the sly.

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He knows, you know, I swear in the same way a shark can smell one part of blood in a million parts of water, he can smell that I have unclicked something on a dropdown I shouldn’t have. I know sharks don’t technically smell blood, but let me have that one, will ya?

Anyway, he came bearing a gift. A book about bullet journaling, with one of the dotted notepads that you use to do said bullet journaling.

He didn’t say it as much, or perhaps he did, but he was certainly loudly intimating that using your phone or any electronically connected thing can often distract you from the task at hand. I mean, if you grab your phone to make a note, what’s to stop you from thinking, “I wonder what comments I may have had on Insta,” or “I wonder if there are any dogs being reunited on YT while I’m here.”

Perhaps he was suggesting too, that my reliance to do everything on a phone or laptop, i.e. lists and journalling of life too, is not always the cleanest way to be productive because of the distractions possibilities. I mean I came here to make a note, remember life, who said what to who, and make plans, Nigel.

“Nigel?”

“Who is this Nigel?”

It’s a song, a little easter egg thrown into the script to tempt you to look for it on YouTube without clicking on to anything else in the meantime.

My synapses or whatever are firing aren’t they, look at those connections go!

I did think at first, “Well that might work for you, but for me, it’s just another thing I need to think of in terms of making notes in… you’ve just handed me, albeit pen and paper lead, another attention sponge.”

But then I did a little reading, over the last day or so and have come up with some thoughts on how our screens have rewired our brains. And moreover whether we can do anything about it.

My main weakness in terms of social media is YouTube.

I seem incapable of a simple search about a leaky drainpipe. Before I even type a single word into the search bar, a thumbnail catches my eye, a conspiracy theory (I’m not even a theorist), politics, yes bloomin’ politics, whether my team might win the league, aircraft landing on carriers, look I’ll open it now, and I promise you I’ll not click on a film. Here’s the list that comes up, standby. These are the titles that show first.

How to get your kicks working in a DIY shop. It looks like comedy, I think it is, I’m not clicking on it.

The most intense day of my photography career. I’m alright, it’s too clickbaity, though I like the creator of it… the DIY shop is still the one I’d have gone for.

Then the shorts, there’s one about a climber panicking on a free climb, he’s the world’s best climber, so I think I may have clicked this only to find out how he succeeded in the end. The only five exercises you need to get jacked. Nuff said, I don’t feel I need to go there, because I certainly do not look like the guy in the thumbnail. But he just may have the secret right? There’s a dog being reunited with his owner after five years, this is getting harder you know… look have I made my point?

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With YT, I click and really, twenty minutes evaporate. I close the app and wonder what I was looking for in the first place.

If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. And according to Ryder Carroll, the designer who created the Bullet Journal Method, this isn’t a personal failing; it’s by design.

Bullet point, because it seems appropriate. The Deliberate Architecture of Distraction.

Ryder Carroll, who spent years struggling with attention difficulties before developing his analogue productivity system, has become one of the most articulate voices on what our digital devices are doing to our capacity for focus. In his book The Bullet Journal Method, he describes our smartphones and apps as “weapons of mass distraction,” engineered with extraordinary precision to capture and monetise our attention.

The mechanics are simple but devastating. Every app on your phone has been optimised through thousands of tests (whoever they are), refined by behavioural psychologists, and tuned by machine learning algorithms with one goal: keep you engaged. Not informed. Not productive. Not happy. Just engaged.

Because engagement, measured in minutes and hours, translates directly into advertising revenue. No wotsit Sherlock.

YouTube’s autoplay feature, which queues up the next video before you’ve finished the current one, wasn’t created for your convenience. It was created because YouTube’s engineers discovered that removing the choice, what they call choice friction, that moment where you might decide to close the app, resulted in dramatically longer viewing sessions.

The algorithm learns what keeps you specifically watching, building an ever-more-accurate model of your likes and, let’s call it weaknesses. Dogs being reunited, chief one of mine.

But why does it work so effectively? The answer lies in how these platforms exploit our brain’s reward circuitry. Every time you pull down to refresh your social media feed, you’re engaging in what behavioral psychologists call a “variable reward schedule”—the same mechanism that makes slot machines so addictive.

You don’t know what you’ll find when you refresh. Maybe nothing. Maybe something mildly interesting. Maybe something that triggers a dopamine spike, a like on your post, a message from someone you care about, a piece of outrageous news. This unpredictability is crucial. If rewards were predictable, we’d lose interest.

Ryder Carroll noticed that we developed what he calls “rapid cognitive shifting”—the habit of jumping from stimulus to stimulus without ever going deep. There’s always something new, something now, something urgent-seeming but ultimately trivial. The infinite scroll means there’s no natural stopping point, no sense of completion. You can never reach the end of TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter, sorry, I refused to call it X.

To use my favourite TV detective Columbo, there’s always ‘one more post, one more video, one more thing to check. Bring me a bowl of chilli will ya?’

Traditional media had natural boundaries; the newspaper had a last page, a TV show had an ending, and you couldn’t binge-watch on day one, and a magazine could be finished. You could stop consuming, and actually it wasn’t even your choice.

“What do you mean I’ve got to wait to next week to find out what happened in Call the midwife?”

When we’re constantly interrupted, constantly pulled toward whatever flashing light demands our attention, we lose the capacity for self-reflection, Ryder’s words there. We become, in his words, “strangers to ourselves.”

If I were a dog now, like one of the ones in the dog reuniting shorts, I would be running around in circles chasing my tail in excitement, because even though I knew this stuff, I don’t think I ever really knew it, if that makes sense.

The Bullet Journal Method emerged from Ryder Carroll’s personal struggle with this fragmentation. As someone with ADHD, he found that digital tools, far from helping him organise his thoughts, made his attention problems worse. The constant notifications, the switching between apps, the infinite possibility of distraction, all of it created cognitive chaos.

So his solution was radically analogue: a paper notebook with a simple system for tracking tasks, events, and notes. Writing by hand is slower than typing. Turning pages is slower than swiping. This friction, the word now being used more positively at this stage became the real feature.

I often talk about photography slowing me down and creating space for thought, and here it is in a journaling form.

Of course, understanding this doesn’t make the pull go away. But it does change the nature of the struggle. It’s not my fault that I opened YouTube for one thing and got lost for twenty minutes. That outcome was engineered by some of the smartest designers and psychologists in the world, backed by billions of dollars in resources. The platform won because it was built to win.

The way forward, as Ryder Carroll suggests, isn’t to fight these systems with willpower alone, because like a donut that says ‘eat me,’ willpower is finite, and these systems are relentless. Instead, we need to build new systems, new habits, new environments that work with our brain’s tendencies rather than against them. Your brain didn’t evolve to resist infinite scrolling. But it did evolve to adapt, to learn, to change. The same neuroplasticity that allowed these apps to train you into distraction can train you back toward focus, one intentional choice at a time.

So I have just received this gift from Neil. It could be a gift of time, a gift of concentration, a gift of patience, a gift of… so many things, and I think I’m in. I’m fascinated, that’s for sure.

It’s food for thought while I make a cuppa, and please, even given I’ve just said, would you excuse me for five minutes? I do need to go and watch a film about, how to get your kicks working in a DIY shop. And then I promise to bullet journal my experience.