Category Archives: socio-cultural

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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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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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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Oct 07 2025
1 Comment
socio-cultural

Making a Dent

The word itself is plain enough. A dent is what you notice on your car after some clumsy berk has parked too closely and biffed their door into yours. It’s a mark, a bruise, a reminder that force was applied – and something yielded. In English it comes from the same (ahem) root as tooth*. A bite-mark on the surface of things.

Somewhere along the way though it was promoted. No longer just damage, it became ambition. “Make a dent in the universe,” said Steve Jobs, and since then entrepreneurs have repeated the phrase as if the only worthwhile mark is a cosmic one. The dent as disruption, scale, transformation. Anything less is failure.

But the smaller dents are the ones that stay with you. It might have been the teacher who insisted (as one of mine did) that you should all learn the famous Hamlet soliloquy. Or it’s the neighbour who always walked their dog and said hello at the same time every. single. day. The colleague who set out all the chairs just-so before an important client pitch. None of these altered the universe, yet all left their trace. They changed the shape of memory.

I wrote recently on Facebook about how I think of my own father. He was never one for speeches or grand lessons, but I recall often the steady choreography of ordinary competence and reliability: how he chained the door and set the house alarm each night, how he did the family sums on the dining table, how his handwriting looked like copperplate. To a child, these things mattered. They were evidence of his authority, of order. They left their mark, quietly but permanently.

A close-up of a butter knife spreading butter on half a bagel, placed on a plain ceramic plate on a wooden table with a linen cloth. A child’s small hand rests nearby, watching quietly.
The smallest rituals are noticed. Even a bagel, even the buttering.

Years later, on a beach holiday, I read The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Its premise stuck: you pass through life leaving marks on people you barely notice, and they on you. The scale of influence is hidden, but no less profound for it.

My sister knows this now. She works in a primary school and (again, recently) received a thank-you so personal it landed hard, parents saying she was unforgettable in their child’s life. I shot back: “You’ve made a dent.” The phrase had lodged in my head decades earlier from a boss ** in the early 2000s (he must have picked it up from Jobs). Back then it sounded like a corporate battle cry. In her case it was entirely different: personal and resonant at a human scale.

The same pattern plays out in reverse: not just what we do to others, but how they take it in and echo it. You see younger eyes taking in far more than you intended, in my case, with my son. The joke repeated, the mannerism borrowed, the odd seriousness with which a child observes how a bagel is buttered. It is flattering and unnerving in equal measure. You realise you are denting the surface whether you mean to or not.

This is why the Jobsian version rings hollow. It’s not the universe waiting to be dented. People are. And the dents that matter are not the ones scaled up for shareholders or history books, but the grooves worn into habit and recollection. They accumulate into something like folklore.

A dent, after all, is both damage and record. It tells you that contact occurred, that someone was here, that effort was made. The question is not whether we leave dents, we all do, but whether they are the sort of impressions others are glad to carry.

Perhaps that is enough. To dent memory. To be felt after the fact, in the small rituals and rhythms that survive us. Jobs aimed for galaxies. Most of us work closer to home, and the marks we make are no less real for it.

* hat tip to Leigh Thomas who always loved to expand on the etymology of words in her speeches to our agency. That is her dent on me.

** hat tip too to Darren Cornish who influenced me heavily on what customer experience really should and could be.

AI: This piece was written by me, and this time I used ChatGPT lightly as a sub-editor to smooth out some repetition and find the odd ragged grammar. The experiences, perspectives and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpt and, obv. the image that accompanies it.

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Sep 23 2025
socio-cultural

Life’s Too Short to Scrape the Lurpak. But Maybe That’s the Point

A nearly empty white Lurpak butter tub with a stainless steel knife inside sits on a light wooden kitchen countertop. Beside it is a small ceramic plate scattered with toast crumbs. Soft daylight falls from the left, casting gentle shadows across the minimalist, muted interior with wooden furniture and a blurred potted plant in the background.
Life’s too short to be buttering existential crises out of a plastic tub.

This morning I found myself scraping the bottom of a Lurpak tub.

A white, gently bowing receptacle with just enough residual butter to tease the knife, but not enough to make it worth the effort. And yet, there I was: wrist contorted, scraping sideways, skimming over craters of cold margarine laminate, determined to liberate one last smear.

For toast.

I paused, mid-scrape, and felt the creeping absurdity of it all. Why do we do this? This frugal choreography. This dignified desperation. Is it habit? Shame? Some Protestant hangover of moral rectitude that equates waste with weakness?

Or is it worse than that, is it training?

A kind of domesticated eco-asceticism, learned not out of genuine conviction but out of decades of thinly veiled moral instruction. Don’t waste. Save scraps. Rinse your yoghurt pots. Aspire to net zero in all things, including pleasure. Butter, it turns out, is not neutral.

I don’t want to be the kind of man who scrapes the last dregs of butter from the corners of a tub. It feels small. Slightly emasculating. A man reduced to margarine management. And yet, aren’t these the very values we claim to admire? Moderation. Responsibility. The quiet dignity of thrift.

There’s a strange modern tension here: the aesthetic of abundance, paired with the rituals of restraint. Middle-class frugality presented as virtue. A lifestyle of minimalism, yes, but premium minimalism. We don’t waste Lurpak because it costs £4.50 a tub. Because we bought the “Spreadable” version as a treat and now feel complicit in dairy decadence.

But scratch deeper and it’s not really about the butter at all.

It’s about effort. It’s about where we place it. We pour our energies into small, containable acts of domestic diligence because the larger systems feel untouchable. We cannot fix politics, housing, the climate, or the cultural entropy of our time, but by God, can we finish a tub of butter.

And maybe that’s OK. Maybe part of surviving modern life is choosing the scale at which we can still act meaningfully, however trivial it seems. Scraping the butter is absurd. But so is most of life, and at least this kind of absurdity ends with warm toast.

Still, I didn’t finish it. I threw the tub away, started a new one, and felt a small thrill of liberation.

No one applauds the man who knows when to stop scraping. But they should.

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Sep 12 2025
socio-cultural, work

Too Many Podcasts?

A man in his early thirties sits at a light wooden desk in a softly lit Scandinavian-style room. He wears a grey jumper and has black headphones resting around his neck. Leaning his head on one hand, he looks at his smartphone, which shows a long list of podcast episodes. On the desk in front of him are a ceramic mug half-filled with tea and a small stack of magazines. The mood is contemplative and slightly weary.
No, I don’t know why the phone is like that either mate. But you get the point. Too many podcasts.

Or, why skipping an episode feels like abandoning a friend.

There’s a particular guilt that comes from skipping ahead in a podcast series. Not the comedian-chats-to-comedian ones, or Desert Island Discs, those you can binge or bin at will. I’m talking about the recurring ones. The talky ones. The ones hosted by people you like, or worse, people you know. Miss a week and you don’t just lose the thread, you lose the right to laugh. The callbacks make no sense. The in-jokes have moved on. You’re no longer in on it.

I’m aware this sounds neurotic. But I’ve stopped listening to several podcasts not because they got worse, but because I missed two episodes and couldn’t face the trauma of catching up. I know I could jump in. I know no one cares. But somehow, I do. It’s the same part of me that keeps unread issues of The Spectator in a stack, muttering, “I’ll start again from the first issue.” That all came about when Jeremy Clarke got ill and I couldn’t bear reading his brilliant column out of sequence, inevitably posthumously.

The problem therefore, I think, is narrative continuity without narrative urgency. Podcasts, like newsletters or Jeremy’s Low Life column, have become serialised companionships. Their UX rewards loyalty, but punishes lapsed affection. It’s a structure built for the always-on, and it assumes you never really leave.

And the volume. The sheer, relentless sprawl of it. Everyone has a podcast now. Kind, intelligent friends. Former colleagues. Distant people I admire. I say this with genuine affection and no small dose of complicity, I write a blog read by literally tens, so I’m not throwing stones from the hilltop. But podcasting’s democratisation has created a landscape where the bar to entry is nil and the bar to quality is… unacknowledged.

This isn’t a snobby defence of old gatekeepers. The best podcasts out there are often the weirder, niche ones. The ones that would never make it past a commissioner’s desk. But that doesn’t mean the friction was all bad. A copywriter at my former agency once said, “Don’t waste the reader’s time.” With podcasts, the time-wasting is part of the premise.

There’s also the question of emotional design. If podcasts are a medium of intimacy, why are the interfaces and audio frequently so transactional? There’s no gentle onboarding for returners. No “here’s what you missed.” No warm “start here.” Just a reverse-chronological list and an assumption that you’ve kept up.

Imagine if books worked like that. Chapter 17 opens with “As we were saying…” and you’re left frantically flipping back (actually, come to think of it, that’s the exact reason why I really started to hate Thursday Murder Club). Or if Netflix removed season recaps because you should’ve been paying attention. It’s not hostile, exactly. Just… indifferent.

So what would better design look like? Perhaps:

  • A podcast player UI that lets hosts flag standalone episodes for returners.
  • A soft re-entry note at the top of an episode: “You don’t need the last three. This one’s its own thing.”
  • A brief recap audio snippet or even a written primer for regulars who’ve been away.

Small things. But they matter. Because as much as podcasts masquerade as friends chatting in your ears, they’re still products. And products that ignore re-entry, or punish time away, eventually lose people, not to rage, but to fatigue.

I don’t think we need fewer podcasts. That would be like saying we need fewer books. But we do need better affordances for how people actually consume them: messily, sporadically, guiltily.

We don’t stop listening because we’re bored. We stop because the emotional lift of rejoining feels heavier than just starting something new.

And if you’re wondering whether I’ll catch up on that podcast you recommended last month, the answer is no. I fell behind. And now I can’t remember when his dog died.

AI: This piece was written by me, I did use ChatGPT to sub-edit, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.

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Sep 04 2025
socio-cultural

The Wonderful Trick of Memory

This morning I watched Richard E. Grant talk about his late wife Joan. Four years gone, he said, but what his mind serves up now isn’t the frailty of her last months, but her in good health.

“The wonderful trick of memory means that we now remember her in full health rather than the last 8 months of her Life.”

And he’s right, it is a trick, but not sleight-of-hand. Psychologists have know of this bias for decades. Negative emotions tied to autobiographical memories fade quicker than positive ones. It’s called the fading affect bias. Your mind isn’t erasing facts, it’s acting like a producer in the studio, quietly turning down the volume on the anguish while letting the warmth keep playing at full volume.

Other processes chime in. Every time we recall a memory it’s rewritten, not replayed. That’s reconsolidation, and it means memories get smudged and softened, sometimes in our favour. Trauma therapists use this to their advantage, nudging one’s recall toward less damaging associations. In grief, the brain seems to do it on its own, substituting the image of the person in decline for the person as they really were. Not denial. Not repression. A form of mercy.

I’ve had a rough few years myself, different terrain, not bereavement. But I’ve clung to the old adage that time heals. It turns out that isn’t just Pollyanna sentimentality: it’s neurology. The sting dulls, the good bits endure. The mind edits.

Yet (Grant aside) scroll through the socials or (even the trad press) and you’d think the brain is a broken appliance needing constant external servicing. Talking therapies, sound baths, mindfulness apps (with subscriptions, natch). So. Much. Talking. All while PTSD headlines insist almost the opposite, that memory is a cement block dragging lives under.

Of course, trauma can lock memory in its raw, searing form. That’s the clinical exception. But for the rest of us, maybe the task isn’t endless intervention? Maybe it’s a lighter hand. Trusting that our brains are, on balance, fairly decent editors. That focussing on the good, replaying and re-storifying it, gives it more weight in the archive. I’m taking a leap here but perhaps Richard E. Grant didn’t “work through” those final months. He simply outlived their dominance.

There’s something oddly hopeful in that. Not a quick fix, not an app notification or a breathlessly titled self-help paperback, but a reminder that forgetting is not failure, it’s function. Memory is a museum curator, and sometimes the exhibition changes.

AI disclaimer: This piece was written by me, but I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, check and surface study references, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.

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