Author Archives: John Gibbard

Dec 16 2025
socio-cultural

The Low-Level Panic of Loving Your Children Too Much

People talk about the joys of parenting. First steps, packed lunches, school performances, the weird drawings you pretend to understand. What they rarely mention is the dread. The background hum of terror that flickers on whenever a child coughs a few too many times. Or sleeps oddly still. Or says their leg “feels funny.” That quiet panic sitting in the corner of the room like damp on a November afternoon.

It’s not fashionable to admit this. You don’t see it on Reels. Especially when the culture is busy telling child-free adults to live their truth, offering thoughtful monologues about staying free and unencumbered. Greg James did exactly that recently — perfectly sane, perfectly kind reflections about whether parenthood is the right path for him. He talked warmly about being an uncle, getting on with kids, imagining he’d be a good dad. All very decent.

But nothing prepares you for the way your insides rearrange themselves once you’re responsible for someone small. You can like children, adore your nephew, help with homework, coach, babysit, buy the really good Lego — but I honestly believe there’s a gear that only unlocks when the child is yours. The quiet, unasked-for dread that trails you through the supermarket aisles and the commute. The catastrophic thinking that sprints ten steps ahead at the first sniffle or tummy ache. The sense that the universe has handed you a priceless vase made of exquisitely fragile glass and told you to “relax.”

I’ve lost hours to it. Days, if I’m honest. A single offhand story about a young lad collapsing on a football pitch — the first sign of a major tumour — and I’ve carried it around like a stone in my coat pocket for two years. I don’t know the family. I don’t need to. The narrative lodged itself anyway, ready to surface whenever my son rubs his head or our daughter looks paler than usual. Health anxiety works like a Google search with SafeSearch off: one stray suggestion and you’re already halfway to the bleakest possible conclusion.

It’s the availability heuristic, of course, but knowing the term doesn’t blunt the feeling. Same with turbulence. You can memorise every statistic about aviation safety and still grip the armrest like an Edwardian widow the moment the plane shudders. Parenting has that same quality. Logic quietly steps out for air.

You try to counter it. Rituals. Breathing techniques. The practical stuff. You read thoughtful columnists finding comfort in the rhythms of Christian worship (not belief exactly, more a kind of inherited spiritual muscle memory from school services, weddings, funerals) and you wonder if you’ve missed something. I’m not a man of faith, not in the sturdy, reassuring sense, and every so often that old question returns: how could any benevolent force allow the worst things that happen to children? I know there are theological answers. They don’t sit easily. They feel like plaster over a crack that goes straight through the brickwork.

Recently we were back in a hospital waiting room with one child for something we’re told is routine, an abundance of caution, probably nothing. But the body doesn’t care about disclaimers. It has already sprinted ahead, cataloguing every dreadful story it can dredge up. I don’t resent the responsibility. I resent the helplessness. The lack of agency. The fact that all the care, all the planning, the good diets and parkruns, all the love and vigilance in the world don’t grant any guarantees.

A father and his young son sit together in a sun-lit hospital waiting room. The father looks ahead, hands clasped, while the child reads a book calmly beside him. Empty chairs and soft winter light create a quiet, reflective atmosphere.
Waiting, with all the worry in the world and a child who’s already bored.

What surprises me is how little this gets mentioned. Parents will talk about sleepless nights with toddlers, about juggling schedules, about the occasional primal scream behind a closed door (par for the course on parenting social media) but the terror stays unspoken. Maybe it feels melodramatic to name it? Maybe naming it makes it real. Maybe everyone assumes they’re the only one who thinks like this, when in reality every parent in the GP’s waiting room is conducting their own private risk assessment.

Still, beneath the panic, there’s a quieter truth. The fear exists because the love exists. It isn’t noble. It isn’t poetic. It’s just the cost of being wired into a relationship with no off-switch. Fragile adults raising even more fragile children, and nothing — be it logic or optimism — changes the basic terms.

But the edges can be softened. Some people reach for faith. Others learn to zoom out, pull the camera back to 0.5 and get the wide angle; the school run, the lunches, the scuffed shoes by the door. Some develop attentional control: noticing a catastrophic thought without sending the cavalry after it. And some simply get better at living alongside the dread in the same way you live alongside the awareness that life, in all its glory, is temporary.

What helps, oddly enough, is admitting the feeling exists at all. Saying it plainly. Not for sympathy, just to release the valve. The terror doesn’t vanish, but it loses some of its force. It becomes something you can look at in daylight rather than a shape pressing at the edges of the mind.

When we walked into the hospital, I felt all of it again, the dread, the borrowed anecdotes, the tabloid tragedies, the absurd certainty that one raised consultant’s eyebrow can become catastrophe. And yet, watching him twizzle his hair while he read his book, bored already, asking whether we can get a McDonald’s afterwards, the fear hushed. Not gone. Just quieter. That’s the closest thing to optimism I can manage right now: the idea that joy still insists on showing up, even on the days when the worry is thick enough to taste.

Perhaps that’s the whole reflective acceptance of parenting, neither dread, nor love, nor helplessness in isolation, but the odd equilibrium where all of it sits together, swirling, while your child smiles an asks if they can have a burger.

Ai: Ai took my original draft and helped me tighten up some of the more ragged bits. Then I used it to sort out some tags, an excerpt and generate an image to accompany the piece. Yes, it might have suggested some em dashes —. The thoughts are understandably entirely mine.

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Dec 09 2025
1 Comment
work

Christmas Shopping Observations, Part Two

What happens when the system finally learns to listen.

Last week in Part One, I described why Christmas shopping feels hostile, why even the most basic purchase turns into a strange performance of archaeology, jargon and filters masquerading as understanding. The real problem wasn’t the products but the machinery. The fiction that a PLP grid is somehow an acceptable translation layer between human intent and retail stock.

This week is the other half of the story: the thing that replaces it.

Because the truth is, we’ve spent twenty years designing for systems that never deserved that level of obedience. We pretended the homepage was the grand entrance, the digital lobby with its scented candles and seasonal banners. We treated it like the flagship store: polished, high-stakes, endlessly debated at internal stakeholder meetings. Meanwhile, almost no one arrived through it, or if they did, they were there for a split second. Most people dropped in sideways, via Google, a WhatsApp link, an email, or a moment of panic at 11 p.m. The homepage was the UX and UI theatre we performed for ourselves and our clients.

Agentic systems make that fiction impossible to sustain. They don’t care about your reception desk and your neatly prioritised way finding. They don’t even see it. They take what you mean, “something thoughtful, about forty quid, she hates clutter, nothing scented” and drop you straight into the one, tiny corner of the site where the decision will live or die. A place that, inconveniently, most retailers still treat as a functional afterthought: the product-detail page.

A minimalist Scandinavian study at dusk, softly lit by a small desk lamp. Snow falls outside the window. On the wooden desk sits an open laptop showing a clean product page with only a few curated gift suggestions. A small, neatly wrapped present rests beside it, suggesting a calm, intentional shopping experience rather than the usual frantic grid of options.
A glimpse of the future: no endless grids, no filters, no festive panic, just a system that actually starts where you are.

The PDP becomes the real front door because in an agentic journey the start isn’t a place, it’s a sentence.

This is where that old inventory-obsessed model buckles. Catalogue commerce was built on the premise that customers begin at the top and drill down. Agentic commerce begins at intent and works sideways. The sitemap is your fiction, not theirs. The system no longer needs your categories. It needs your clarity.

Be under no illusion though, this ain’t easy. This only works if the agent can explain itself. When a system gives you two options instead of two hundred, you need to know why. Not academically, emotionally. Why this jacket and not the other one? Why this feels like her. Why this fits your mental model of who she is. The explanation is the reassurance loop. Without it, the whole thing becomes another opaque machine; efficient, yes, but untrustworthy in all the ways that matter.

And then there’s the serendipity problem. Efficiency is addictive, but clinical. If we strip out every detour, we drain the pleasure along with the friction. The answer isn’t a return to the grid; it’s controlled looseness. A suggestion or two just off-axis. Something adjacent. Not twelve rows of “you may also like” tat, just enough to keep the experience human. Discovery without the search-and-filter trauma.

None of this is a theoretical exercise for me. I genuinely spent years trying to push natural-language intent into car retail at JLR, long before the technology was mature enough to meet the ambition. I saw how people really shopped: not by wheelbase or trim code, but by anxiety, context, and use-case. “Capable in the mud.” “Seven-seater that doesn’t look ridiculous.” “Can get all the family crap in it for Cornwall, without a roof box.” All perfectly rational human requests – treated as nonsense by the old machinery. The ideas weren’t wrong. They were simply early.

Now the technology has finally caught up. And with it, the entire structure of how we design retail subtly shifts. From catalogue to conversation. From homepage theatre to product truth. From filters to language. From the warehouse to the person.

None of this saves Christmas, of course. But it does save us from the annual pantomime of pretending that people enjoy buying gifts and products more generally through a system that refuses to understand how they think or consume any of the deeper context that matters. The future isn’t more choice. It isn’t more filters. It isn’t even more intelligence.

It’s fit.

Fit between intent and suggestion.
Fit between the context you’re in and the thing you’re shown.
Fit between the human messiness of December and the machinery that finally stops treating you like a clumsy clinical user story.

Christmas shopping isn’t a test of skill. It’s a test of whether the system knows how to listen. And for the first time in a long time, it might.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, the post excerpt, image generation and some sub-editing. Ideas, references, and anecdotes are all mine.

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Dec 04 2025
work

Christmas Shopping Observations, Part One.

Why Christmas shopping feels hostile, and why ‘catalogue commerce’ makes it worse.

December always brings the same rituals. Sitting in front of a website with a sense of mild dread. The kind one reserves for using a train station toilet, or getting into the coffee queue after parkrun. The intended tasks isn’t difficult or unpleasant in theory, just buy something thoughtful for someone you care about, but Christmas shopping always manages to feel like cognitive trench warfare. Retailers would have it as “the season of gifting”, the rest of us call it, problem solving with a shot glass of Baileys.

So, for some context, let’s go back to a couple of of weeks ago when I was trying to get myself a replacement down jacket. A bit like when I was trying to get Jo some new Asics, this wasn’t an extravagant task. It wasn’t even particularly interesting. Just a bit of a like-for-like replacement for a much-abused Rab. All I needed was a sub expedition-grade jacket. Black, simple. I know my sizes, I know I needed about 850+ fill power and I was ambivalent about much else. I had a shortlist of brands I like. But dozens of models, filters that are inconsistent across brands, categories that mean nothing to people outside of the industry and a product hierarchy that is the baffling output of a Content Management System (CMS) that’s been operated by a chimp1.

I wasn’t searching as much as performing archaeology. Sifting through layers and brushing off the irrelevant collateral.

A narrow, snow-dusted street in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan on a muted December afternoon. Warm ochre buildings rise on either side as bundled-up shoppers walk away from the camera. Soft shop-window lights and minimalist Christmas displays glow against the cold, creating a calm, human-scale contrast to typical frantic holiday retail.
The Christmas shopping we think we’re doing, before the dropdown menus, filters, and “Gifts for Her” pages slap us back into reality.


In design terms this is what we might call the Gulf of Execution, or as my colleagues and I at Dare liked to call the Experience Gap: the distance between what a human means and what the system is willing to accept. My intent was simple – “warm, minimalist natural down for standing around on platforms, by sports pitches and walking to the pub” – but the interface insisted I drop that down into a dialect of drop-down, checkboxes and jargonist euphemisms. A human request translated into machine-and-catalogue syntax. Little wonder the whole thing feels like a joyless chore.

And Christmas retail only amplifies this.

Every major high street site trots out its annual performance of “Gifts for Her”, a festival of generic filler: candles, scarves, bath sets, socks. The occasional novelty gift set embossed with typography that looks like it was designed at 4pm on a Friday whilst sucking on a fetid vape. It’s all indexed by price bands: “Under £10”, “Under £50”, “Over £250” – as if women are primarily sorted by budget code rather than, say, personality or taste.

No mother wants another hand cream selection.
No thirty-something woman wants coordinated gloves.
No partner wants to receive something that clearly began life as a procurement exercise.

The whole structure is built around the warehouse, not the person. It’s inventory logic masquerading as emotional intelligence. And the moment you notice it, you can’t unsee it: most “gift guides” reveal almost nothing about the recipient and everything about that the retailer wants to shift.

This is the failure baked-into catalogue commerce. It doesn’t matter which brand you pick; the underlying assumption is the same: that human desire can be expressed through filters, and that personality cab be captured in a category label. It’s tidy, rational and optimised. It’s also completely blind as to what makes shopping human in the first place.

Because real gift-buying begins long before the visit to the website. It begins in the cluttered contradictory emotional territory that sits just outside the browser window: What does she already have? What does she love? What has she told me about? What will she pretend to love? What feels thoughtless? What feels too much? What feels like you didn’t think at all (Hint: anything at Boots that comes in a gift box)? Retail ignores all of this and forces you straight into the grid (what we call the Product Listings Page (PLP) ), as if the process were orderly. Spoiler alert, it never is.

This is why Christmas shopping feels hostile. It’s not that the options are universal bad, just that the interface tries to convince you it understands and reflects your mental model when it plainly does not. Handing you a hundred variants of the same filler and expecting conversion gratitude. Somewhere between the filters, the categories and the bath sets you sense the truth: this isn’t built for you. It’s built to organise the warehouse.

Don’t worry though, there’s a better story coming, and the technology to enable it is finally here. But this isn’t the piece for solutions, it’s about naming the problem plainly as it is and without the retail gloss.

Next time I’ll get on to the other half of the picture: the system-level shift that’s going to quietly rewrite the entire experience from how we search to where the journey really begins.

For now its enough to acknowledge the obvious: Christmas shopping isn’t about solving and indecisiveness problem for dumb consumers. It’s a broken model designed around systems that are not built to reflect how people think, feel or choose, especially in December.

Part Two: How agentic solves this, and more.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and some very light sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

  1. Plot twist. I ended up with the Shackleton Ronne. I browsed online for weeks. I did huge amounts of research and comparison and then I went to the wonderful store on Piccadilly and spoke to a great sales assistant there who worked with me to ensure it was absolutely the right fit and will see me out for prob 5-10 years of use. ↩︎

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Dec 02 2025
work

The world doesn’t need another post on Ai and creativity, but here’s one anyway

Apropos of nothing, I keep circling back to Bjarke Ingels’ throwaway observation he shared recently on Instagram about Ai prompting feeling a bit like briefing a team. You describe an intention, something comes back, you adjust. Anyone who’s spent time in a design or strategy studio recognises that scenario instantly, the loose sketch of an idea, the return volley, the shrug, the “maybe try it with less… erm whatever that is.” It felt like it was a nice clean analogy and I was nodding along.

But a studio isn’t a stochastic mirror. It’s a small society of taste and memory. People remember your last terrible idea. Someone raises an eyebrow when a line of copy looks off or a Figma file has gone fully feral. Someone else brings up the project you swore you’d never repeat. The feedback loop is human, textured, occasionally bruising. There’s judgement, shared reference points, work blue-tac’d up on the walls and a quiet sense of “let’s not embarrass ourselves again.”

This is where Ingels’ analogy starts to wobble. When you brief a human, you’re drawing on their judgement, experience, and the unspoken etiquette of a team. When you brief Ai, it behaves nothing like a junior designer and everything like a very confident autocomplete. It gives you the shape of participation without the substance. A colleague can resist you, encourage you to slow you down, challenge the premise. A (poorly prompted) model can’t. It just accelerates whatever direction you gesture toward, even when said direction is wafer thin.

And that, dear reader, is the seduction.

You type a mood, an intention, a half-formed thought, and it hands you an almost-finished artefact that looks uncannily like something you might have made if you’d only had more time or fewer meetings. The danger isn’t metaphysical (“is it creative?” please f- off, of course it is, have you actually looked up the definition of creative?1). The danger is how easy it becomes to confuse fluency with thought.

In my view, craft survives when you know what good feels like before you’ve picked up the pen or clicked New Document. And that’s the bit people don’t want to hear. The reasoning, the taste, the internal guardrails — they’re all invisible, they take years. Instead we’ve bred a culture (particularly evident on LinkedIn) where commentary stands in for competence, and Ai’s instant coherence makes that substitution feel almost legitimate.

I’m genuinely unmoved by the theological wrangling over whether Ai creates. If it’s parrot or Picasso. It’s a probabilistic parlour trick. What matters is simpler: whether the person using it can spot when the output stops making sense and is in fact bullshitting. Shallow but shiny. A calculator is harmless until someone who never learned to add starts doing the accounts. As the kids say “Same energy”.

Used properly, Ai is a fast way to think aloud, and as a sole practitioner, it’s become one of my favourite ways to work. It’s my pressure valve. A drafting companion. It pushes out variations I’d never have the patience to make by hand. But it only works because I already have a decades long sense of structure and gut instinct, the bit that quietly mutters “nope, that’s wrong”, or more accurately “what the actual fuck?” before I can articulate why. Without that, the tool becomes the teacher, and its blind spots become your worldview. I keep thinking about graduates walking straight into roles heavily emboldened by Ai before their judgement has even started to calcify and in that sense it’s a bit like giving a BMW M3 to someone who’s just passed their test. The horsepower arrives long before the skill that stops you putting in a hedge.

This is why the creative and consultancy industries feel brittle. So many people want the polished thought without the unglamorous labour that gives it heft. They want the sketch without the sketching. The judgement without the years that make judgement possible. And Ai, obliging thing that it is, makes that performance look convincing enough to fool the untrained eye, and sometimes even the trained one.

None of this makes the technology good or bad. It just makes it pretty shouty. And once a tool starts talking back, the responsibility shifts to the person holding it. Which is really just to say: the work doesn’t get better because the software is clever. It gets better because someone in the room still knows what good feels like.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were, however all mine.

  1. If you want the long version of why the question “Is Ai creative?” is a trap, Lisa Talia Moretti does a tidy job of dismantling it. She walks through the mess of competing definitions, points out the extent of human labour and data sit behind every so-called “creative” output, and ends up arguing that generative Ai is better understood as a medium than a tool. ↩︎
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Nov 25 2025
socio-cultural

Imitation, Not Demolition

Private education has become the de jour punchbag of British politics — an easy morality play in which centuries of institutions are tried and condemned by a handful of badly-behaved, and dare I say it spiteful, ministers. The private school caricature bears no resemblance to the sector, the people who work in it, or most absurdly, the children inside it.

Strip away the theatrics and the picture sharpens. British independent schools are a globally admired export1; they pull in huge amounts of talent and investment, employ thousands, and act as civic anchors in their communities. They share facilities, teachers, expertise, and pastoral support with neighbouring state schools because, dear reader, that is how most of them actually see their role. That is to say, one not of gated enclaves of inherited privilege but as part of a wider educational ecosystem.

One suspects the loudest objectors often haven’t set foot inside one, and certainly many of the people I see happily reposting and sharing the ill-informed social meeeja posts. Go to an Open Day. Spend any time with the pupils and the Edwardian stage villains dissolve. They are in fact courteous, switched-on, socially literate children being taught in stable, well-governed environments with real pastoral depth. Imagining otherwise does not pass for analysis; it is a displacement activity for people who prefer class warfare to contact. For that is almost exclusively what this is.

A solitary ancient oak, centuries old, stands alone on a windswept English moor at dawn, its gnarled branches reaching defiantly into a brooding, storm-lit sky — quiet, permanent, and utterly irreplaceable.
Frighteningly easy to fell, and impossible to forgive ourselves once the sky is empty.

The VAT wheeze exposes how unserious and skewed the debate has become. We are told it will “raise standards”, yet private healthcare (which naturally also relieves pressure on a stretched public service) remains exempt2. Taxing private schools (or more accurately, penalising the parents of private school kids) is a policy crafted to look righteous from a podium, not one that will strengthen a single physics department or fund a SEND unit. Revenue-raising in sheep’s clothing rarely delivers either revenue or sanctity. This is, evidentially, not an argument of economics, it is one of politics and if your argument for improving state schools is “make private schools worse”, you’ve already admitted you don’t believe the state sector can ever be good enough on its own terms.

We are never more ideological than when we discuss single-sex education. The data on boys is brutal: later maturation, slower executive function, a decade-plus of academic trailing3. Boys’ schools, especially prep and 13+ (in a private system that understands this) were built around those facts, not wishful thinking. The better outcomes they produce are not sorcery; they are the predictable return on taking development seriously. Preferring co-ed may feel ethically cleaner, but cleanliness is not evidence and pretending all variation is moral failure is not progressive, it’s simply lazy.

I say this as a father of an eleven-year-old boy in the single-sex private system and a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter who, with luck, will thrive in the girls’ system. I am not blind to the privilege. I am also a single sex grammar-school state boy still active on its alumni committee; my sister is a deputy head in a co-ed state primary; my nephews are all co-ed state educated. My perspective is broad because my life is. I respect the best of both sectors and the staff who hold them together.

Yet I recognise too the extreme social awkwardness of admitting any of this. In 2016-18 I was frequently “the only Tory in your feed” and rounded upon by an overwhelmingly left-liberal consensus. But I quietly like seeing parents, who cannot say publicly that their child is privately educated without being cast as the villain in someone else’s passion play, softly liking posts and commenting below the line. Most make brutal financial and lifestyle sacrifices; we and my fellow cohort parents are not oligarchs hoarding caviar futures. Demonising them (us) is the political equivalent of comfort eating.

Which brings me to a Premier League analogy. Of course many would say the PL is too rich and powerful, most fans want the big clubs to send more money downwards, and quite right too; the pyramid would be healthier for it. But the VAT policy is not a bigger solidarity payment or a fairer split of the TV billions. It is engineered to make independent schools unviable for anyone who isn’t oligarch-rich, to empty the boarding houses, shutter the smaller places, vanish the bursaries, and then declare victory when the waiting lists disappear. Be under no illusion, that is the agenda, not redistribution but rather demolition in a hair shirt, a moralising war on parents who refuse to accept whatever the local state dishes up.

Our education debate treats excellence as provocation and variation as injustice. A confident country would study what works, invest in repairing and replenishing what is weak, and stop pretending resentment is policy (cf. Netherland, Denmark4). We all want a state sector so good that private becomes a preference, not a necessity. That won’t happen by dismantling what already works. It will happen by humility, graft, training, retention, stability and by recognising that imitation, not demolition, is what lifts the whole.

AI disclosure: As always, the thesis and the writing is mine. I use Ai as a sub-editor to align my pieces with my typical style and tidy up the most ragged bits. I also used it to generate the image, the excerpt for the post and suggest the keyword tags. I quite obviously use Google to find relevant facts to support my arguments.

  1. According to the ISC 2025 Census, 25,526 non-British pupils with overseas parents generated > £1.1 billion in fees alone (with ancillary spending pushing the total past £1.3–1.5 billion), while 115 British-branded campuses abroad now educate nearly 100k foreign pupils who never touch UK soil yet pay dearly for the privilege. This isn’t marketing puff; it is the reason Dulwich College Seoul can charge £35k a year and still turn families away, and why successive governments have treated the sector as one of Britain’s last unambiguous soft-power wins. ↩︎
  2. Private medical care supplied by registered health professionals remains fully VAT-exempt under long-standing HMRC rules, a position Wes Streeting reaffirmed in September 2025 when explicitly ruling out any change. ↩︎
  3. In 2025 GCSEs girls outperformed boys by 6.2 percentage points at grade 4+ (70.5% vs 64.3%) and the gap has persisted, essentially unchanged in shape and scale, for well over fifteen years and is just starting to narrow. Neurodevelopmental trajectories show boys’ prefrontal cortex peaking roughly two years later than girls’, with commensurate delays in executive functions (i.e. inhibitory control, attention regulation, emotional self-management) that matter most between 11 and 16. ↩︎
  4. The Netherlands has done exactly this. Apparently (thanks Google) its Constitution mandates equal public funding for public and private schools alike, so two-thirds of Dutch pupils now attend independently run institutions while the entire system remains among the world’s highest-performing and most equitable. There’s no resentment, no demolition, just the quiet confidence of a country that studies what works and copies it. Denmark’s century-old friskoler tradition operates on the same principle and delivers the same result: genuine plurality, higher average standards, and not a single politician wasting breath on punishing parents who dare to choose. ↩︎
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Nov 20 2025
socio-cultural

The Cliff Edge of Middle Age

Black-and-white photograph of an empty, frost-dusted sports pitch at dawn, with long shadows, metal goalposts, and stacked plastic chairs, conveying the quiet absence of routine and community structure.
The things that keep men standing are usually the things no one notices until they’re empty.

We hear it almost every week on social media and in the press: if only men talked more. As if silence were the root cause of everything.

But men do talk. We’ve never had more campaigns, workshops, football-ground ads, celebrity confessions, podcasts, or workplace check-ins. Awareness is not the bottleneck. You can’t fling a flat white in Shoreditch without hitting someone making a documentary or orchestrating a campaign about “men opening up”.

And yet, the suicide rate for men peaks not in youth, but in midlife, forty-five to fifty-four. These are the supposedly settled years, when family and career should provide sufficient ballast. Instead, it’s the cliff edge.

The parallel with childhood in the smartphone era is hard to miss. Just as children have lost the structures of boredom, awkwardness, and unmediated friendship, adults are losing the structures of duty, craft, and continuity. Those same forces, phones, performative identity, secular drift – are hollowing both ends of life. Middle-aged despair and nostalgia for a lost childhood are two sides of the same cultural erosion.

Part of it is the work itself. Men who once called themselves carpenters, miners, or postmen now call themselves contractors on three apps. This loss isn’t simply one of continuity or economics, it’s ontological. When the trades and institutions that once anchored male identity dissolved, nothing replaced them. Progress rightly broadened women’s roles but left men’s scaffolding to rust.

What I think is missing isn’t another awareness week or a better hashtag, it’s structure. That reliable, unglamorous web of roles and obligations that demand consistent presence and usefulness. Structure, I truly believe, creates the conditions for grit, stoicism, resilience; the quality required to face life’s chaos without disintegrating.

Four Pillars

  • Stable roles: work or duties that confer identity beyond the next contract.
  • Shared obligations: being the one who brings the kit, runs the line, sets out the chairs.
  • Continuity: clubs of all kinds, parishes, allotments, institutions that outlast individual seasons.
  • Recognition in absence: places where you’re noticed if you don’t show up.

Now, these aren’t nostalgic tokens. They’re the mechanisms of accountability and friction. Friction builds strength. It stops people flapping when real adversity hits. Talking helps, but talk without structure is vapour: empathy without scaffolding.

Having purpose then is not an insight, it’s an act. A sequence of embodied, useful gestures that prove one’s value to others. It’s a personal responsibility, not something to be delegated to an app, a therapist, or a men’s shed. Those are just the supports, not substitutes. They matter most and are useful augmentations only when attached to the rhythm of an ordinary, useful life.

Because purpose lives in function, not in show. So, until we rebuild those structures of continuity and obligation, the well-meaning chorus of “men just need to talk more” will keep echoing across empty ground, like a gossamer-thin corporate wellness seminar where everyone nods sagely at the flipchart, fills out a feedback form, and goes straight back to crying in the gents.

AI and disclosures: This piece used AI to surface relevant psychology references to support my personal thesis. I also used it for the tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The writing, and personal reflections were all mine and informed in part through close personal experience with these matters.

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Nov 06 2025
socio-cultural, work

Ghosts in the Picture Book

The other day, I was reading a children’s book with our daughter when I saw it: a corded telephone. Black, wall-mounted, with a dangling spiral wire. The sort of phone that last rang in anger sometime around the Blair years.

Roger Hargreaves's; Little Miss Neat picks up vintage style corded black telephone.
The Telephone rang. Little Miss Neat picked it up.

A few mornings later, it happened again, Baby Club on the BBC, all primary colours and soft clapping, and there, on the play mat , was a car. Not one she’d ever recognise. A boxy saloon. Straight-edged. Round headlights. The kind of thing you’d find idling outside a golf club in 1987.

What’s odd isn’t that these images exist, they’re charming, even lovingly drawn. It’s that they still feel like the default. Most phones today are glass bricks. Most cars look like they’ve been inflated rather than put together in a factory.

But when we illustrate for children, we reach back, not to what they know, but to what we remember. This isn’t a developmental crisis. Children don’t need realism to read meaning.

Jean Mandler’s research (thank you ‘Ai research team’) showed they use schematic categories, “car,” “dog,” “phone”, not photoreal recall.

Furthermore, Ellen Winner proved they can grasp symbolism early on (i.e. hey don’t need realism to understand things). So, no one’s confused. That’s not the point. The point is that these images persist, long after their referents have disappeared. The floppy disk still means save. A film reel still means video. A telephone still curls like a question mark.

We say it’s just design shorthand, but it isn’t. It’s something stickier.

These are the ghosts of our interfaces, icons of touchpoints no child will ever touch.

Gunther Kress‘ observations describe how meaning doesn’t update on command. It drags history behind it and changing the meaning of symbols requires overcoming an awful lot of cultural inertia. And children’s media, shaped entirely by adults, ends up as a kind of curated hauntology: a world that looks nothing like theirs, but everything like ours did, right around the time we were their age.

They swipe past rotary phones, expect Santa to come down a chimney no longer connected to a fireplace, draw little square cars with four doors and no raised suspension. It’s sentimental and not remotely sinister but it does mean they grow up consuming artefacts of use they’ll never need.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s like castles in fairy tales. But it’s hard not to feel the ache of it, that their books are filled with our objects, our past, our cultural residue.

Perhaps more concerningly, they’re not learning to navigate the world as it is. They’re learning to decode the leftovers of how we once did.

So I find myself wondering now what a picture book drawn from today would look like. Would the car even be recognisable? Would anyone bother sketching a glass rectangle phone? Or would the page just show a toddler, alone, swiping at the air, waiting for something to respond.

AI: This piece used AI to help me research the psychology references and summarise their observations. I used it for the tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

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Nov 04 2025
socio-cultural, work

The Week Away That Never Quite Happens

Every few weeks at this time of year, my thumb betrays me. It hovers over a post of a cabin somewhere on the edge of a loch or moor, all shō sugi ban cladding, light oak, mid-century desks and ‘vintage’ lightbulbs, and presses like. The algorithm now thinks I’m the sort of man who wears wool socks and writes preposterously neatly in propelling pencil beside a woodburner. It’s not entirely wrong.

There’s something magnetic about those images: the design-led minimalism that’s somehow still warm; the promise of solitude that doesn’t look lonely. I imagine a week in one of them — laptop off, phone on airplane, words finally unspooling in peace. I can practically smell the Danish oil.

A lone Scandinavian-looking cabin from 57 Nord contemplates its life choices above a Scottish loch, surrounded by smugly photogenic hills pretending it’s always this sunny.
The luxury of slow living at 57 Nord: 57nord.co.uk .. a cabin I adore, can’t afford and will never book

This time of year encourages such delusions. There’s just enough light in the mornings to feel alive, but enough dusk to make retreat seem reasonable. You could slip away for a week and no one would really notice. The trees are almost bare, the pubs half-empty, and the countryside looks half-finished, as if waiting for someone to turn up with a notebook.

In my head, I’m dictating into my phone while trudging through leaf-sodden lanes or across a windswept upland. Evenings mean simple food, one-pot stews, bread, the sort of red wine you can chew, and perhaps the odd night at a pub, purely for proof of humanity. I’d come back leaner, calmer, possibly holding the first chapter of The Book*.

Except I never go. Yes, a little because of fear or money (and the logistics of family life) but mostly because the fantasy works too well.. The idea of the week away does its job before it begins: it restores a sense of possible order. Just imagining the solitude feels productive, which is as close to it as most of us ever get.

What makes us crave it? Age, maybe – the mid-life suspicion that our attention’s been pawned off to apps and admin. Or perhaps it’s just winter and that soft command to draw inwards, to tidy one’s psyche before spring. Either way, the idea of leaving it all behind has become one more thing to scroll through, admire … and postpone.

I like to think it’s not laziness but calibration by which I mean a quiet audit of what would actually change if I went. Would I write more? Probably not. Would I look less at my phone? For a day, perhaps two. Mostly, I’d just be somewhere else doing the same gentle dance of distraction, albeit with better lighting and a view.

Still, the fantasy has its use. It reminds me there’s another tempo available, one I could, in theory, choose. And maybe that’s enough for now. Some people meditate. I browse cabins I’ll never book. We each find our way back to silence, even if it’s only through the screen.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine and were composed in Surrey, not Scotland.

* this is my first public announcement that I do have a (non fiction) book in mind. It may also be the only time I ever mention it.

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Nov 02 2025
work

Time Returned, Time Resold

Rain-blurred motorway at dusk viewed through a windscreen; dashboard lights glow amber in an empty driver’s seat — a quiet image of autonomy and time unclaimed.
Autonomy promised freedom. Instead, it gave us metrics.

Every few years a new invention turns up promising to give us time back. The dishwasher did it, then the calendar app, now the self-driving car. Efficiency, they say, is liberation. But the minutes never come home. They’re quietly re-employed: answering messages that weren’t urgent until we saw them, scrolling through news we already half-read. We don’t get more time. It just comes back wearing a different outfit.

Design now speaks the intoxicating language of generosity. We’ll save you clicks. We’ll make it seamless. Lovely words, but they come with a tempo you didn’t choose. The system nudges, reminds, congratulates you on your streak. Even the oven chirps when it’s done pre-heating. Helpful, yes – in the way a personal trainer is helpful when all you wanted was a walk.

Efficiency was meant to hush the world, not make it chatter. Parcels update you mid-journey, cars suggest faster routes, TV apps interrupt the credits to make sure you don’t go off to bed just yet. You start to feel managed by your own apps and appliances. Is it me, or do they all sound slightly pleased with themselves?

Still, there is a deeper promise in all this autonomy. Because the best thing about a self-driving car isn’t speed, it’s permission. The choice to drive when you want to: for rhythm, for presence, for drivers like me who relish the satisfaction of line and camber, and to switch off when you don’t. The long crawl north to the Lakes. The dawn blast to the airport. The late-night, rain-spray-soaked slog home when you’d gladly hand over the wheel and let the motorway unspool while you exhale, watch the window-light flicker, maybe half-doze through an episode of something forgettable. Control should be optional, not constant.

That’s what the technology could be about: selective surrender or a quieter freedom. But for some unfathomable reason, the marketing and product design departments have decided autonomy is best packaged as constant optimisation. That means another dashboard app full of metrics and prompts and juanty reminders. We built cars clever enough to drive themselves, then gave them personalities that never stop talking.

Real luxury now isn’t speed but discretion: the right to decide how long something should take. To drive when you feel like driving. To look out of the window when you don’t. Technology can make both possible.

Convenience promised to return our hours, but mostly it’s taught us to account for them. Every minute feels spoken for. Perhaps the odd thing is how willingly we’ve agreed to it and the peculiar pleasure we take in shaving seconds off tasks we didn’t enjoy anyway.

Maybe the best thing a self-driving car could do is forget the ETA and let us forget, too.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine.

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Oct 23 2025
socio-cultural

The cult of the worthy garden

In The Times yesterday, as we descend into a storm-filled few days of autumn, there was a little glimpse of Spring ’26: the line-up for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May. Britain’s annual proof that we can still grow things even if we can’t quite govern them. Every year the press release reads a little more like a mindfulness pamphlet, hope, resilience, healing through nature. May’s line-up is depressingly familiar: Parkinson’s, asthma, gynaecological cancer – each of course exquisitely planted, each designed to make one feel faintly guilty for not being ill yourself (or worse, triggering the health anxiety you fight almost daily).

This is far from a dig (!) at the designers. They’re extraordinary – and the reason I return year after year. Some of the most inventive visual thinkers and horticultural artisans in the country. You could hand them a brief about midlife ennui and they’d produce something quietly transcendental. But notwithstanding this world-class craft, the culture that surrounds them (the commissioners, sponsors and curators, the gushing BBC scripts for reverent narrators describing the “healing”) rather wrings the joy out of horticulture. And, I might argue, severs the connection from our own plots where we aren’t putting in corten steels laser-etched with messages from sympathy cards sent to Grandma when Grandad died.

For the last decade, Chelsea has sounded less like a flower show and more like a group therapy retreat funded by Coutts and serving South African rosé. Every garden, sine qua non, must mean something. Every sponsor must emote through the plant list and recycled-paper design statement. The law firms are at it too, Corporate Britain has discovered mortality and it must keep workshopping it.

Aerial view of the Campaign to Protect Rural England – On the Edge show garden designed by Sarah Eberle for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The design features a circular, sunken seating area bordered by curved dry-stone walls, a reflective black water bowl at its centre, and densely planted perimeters of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers in green and white tones. The layout creates a naturalistic, enclosed sanctuary with winding paths and layered planting that evoke the edge of a woodland or coastal landscape.
Particularly looking forward to Sarah Eberle’s return to Main Avenue — one of the few 2026 show gardens with a brief that feels refreshingly light of touch.

Of course, a sombre brief needn’t make a sombre garden. Most of these designers still find moments of light and sometimes even laughter amid the gravity, that’s their genius, natch. But the problem is saturation. When every garden carries a diagnosis, the cumulative effect is numbing at best and quietly oppressive at worst. You can admire the craft, the planting, the colour, and still feel the weight of mortality pressing against the rope fence. One or two gardens about illness are moving; a dozen and it starts to feel like palliative care with mottled sunlight. The tragedy therefore isn’t in the planting, it’s in the packaging. Even when a designer finds joy, the institution rushes in to label it therapy.

Ten years ago (and perhaps I misremember) you might have had one or two charity gardens, their presence was powerful precisely because of that juxtaposition. Now almost every plot is tied to a medical condition, social cause or climate anxiety. The messaging has become so homogeneous it borders on satire: “healing,” “hope,” “resilience,” the RHS bingo card of benevolence. The poignancy cancels itself out among a cacophony of good intentions, white noise amid the frothy borders and swept pavers.

Of course these causes matter; it’s simply that the monoculture of worthiness leaves little room for unfettered joy. The very people (RHS members and the paying public) say it outright in the comments: “God forbid we could just have lovely, liveable gardens.” Others confess they no longer bother going, the crowds, cost and piety becoming too much of a hurdle to clear just to enjoy the flora. It makes one wonder whether the charities have done a cost-benefit analysis on being yet another earnest voice in a field of them.

A while back I wrote about human-centred garden design, the idea that landscapes should serve the people who live in them, not the narratives imposed upon them. I still believe that. But the pendulum has swung from self-expression to self-help. Designers stopped building for themselves, only to start building for someone’s trauma instead. The irony is that true human-centred design, the kind practised by Zetterman, Pearson, Wilkinson or Nordfjell, already is healing, precisely because it doesn’t insist on it. Their shared language of calm geometry, natural materiality and measured restraint gives people space to feel, rather than instructing them what to feel, elegant evidence that joy and contemplation can coexist without a press release or a prime-time TV walkthrough to explain it. A well-made garden gives you peace without telling you you’re broken.

Every so often, something still slips through, a garden like 2025’s Monty’s Radio 2 Dog Garden plot, joyous, affectionate, full of warmth, and you remember how good Chelsea can be when it drops the self-consciousness and simply revels in life.

If I were a bank or a law firm with money to spend, I’d commission rebellion: a garden about the thrill of travel, the dynamism of the next generation, the sheer optimism of growth. Not a metaphor. Not a manifesto. Just a riot of clever planting that exists because it can.

Because all beautiful gardens are healing. They always have been. They don’t need to say they’re healing; they just are. And that’s the point the RHS seems to have forgotten – that beauty itself is the therapy. If the great British flower show can’t find joy in flowers any more, if every petal must carry a moral story, then perhaps it’s not resilience we need, but relief.

Come on, RHS. Lighten up.

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