Three years ago, feeling much like a hedgehog staring into headlights, I wrote about exponential growth, at the point where UK hospital cases from COVID were doubling every 4 days due to a colossal failure of government to do anything…
One year ago, I couldn’t think about anything but the pandemic. By the time the UK started to take it seriously, I had been worrying about it for more than two months: I had a Chinese coworker who had…
Two years ago today, a long-ago ex-lover of mine died.…
Stories are like crows circling in and out of sight in the mist overhead: there's no simple distinction between one of them and another, and the precise flight path of any one particular crow is known only to itself…
It's been a strange summer. It can't be the first year I haven't had a holiday, but it's the first year that a global pandemic has forced me to cancel my holiday and stay at home for month after month.…
The final hand-in deadline for my MA course is at the start of September, and effectively that will end my two years as a mature student. I enjoyed the classes, the cameraderie with classmates, and the access to university facilities,…
Interstitial spaces are defined by what they are between. They are non-places, between other, proper places. Here is one. In web design, an interstitial meant a “please wait” screen displayed to deter the user from closing the browser whilst the…
Yes, it's a post about the COVID-19 pandemic, because this year nobody is talking about anything else. But I've been holding off because the situation changes every day…
I've noticed one or two of my Creative Writing classmates referring to themselves on social media as a writer. Perhaps it jumped out at me. Obviously I write (the evidence is right here), but I don't really think of myself as a writer.…
I've now posted a photo to my Instagram every day for 6 months. I'm halfway through the first year, and a quarter of the way through my two-year part-time degree.…
Returning to Newcastle 25 years after living here has been a disorientating experience. Walking down familiar streets, there are unfamiliar absences and presences, and, which is even odder, buildings that I can see are new, but I can't for the life of me remember what was there before.…
Microsoft announced recently that it has developed *its own* distribution of Linux. Having followed the IT industry since around the time MS-DOS came out, this is hard to digest and gives rise to some complicated feelings.…