Essays

A handful of the ones that get the most post. The full list is in the archive.

Admin as a form of weather

November 2025

There is a particular kind of task that costs nothing and becomes impossible. A form. A phone call to the dentist. Moving a direct debit. Healthy people find this funny in a bewildered way, and they're not wrong to — it is objectively absurd that a person who can hold down a job cannot ring a dentist for nine weeks.

What I've stopped doing is trying to explain it as laziness with better vocabulary. It behaves more like weather. Some weeks the forms are fine. The useful move, for me, has been to do the admin on the days it's fine, in a batch, rather than pretending each individual task is available whenever I decide it should be.

On being asked how I am by someone who means it

May 2026

Most people asking how you are do not want the long answer, and this is fine and civilised. The difficult ones are the people who do. Their sincerity puts the burden back on you: now you have to produce something true, in a corridor, in under a minute.

My compromise, after some years, is a phrase that is true and short. "It's a low week, but a normal low week." People who need to can do something with that. People who don't can move on. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that this was allowed.

Fourteen years of the same walk

February 2026

The same route, most days, since 2012. Out of the house, along the canal, past the lock, back along the road. Fifty minutes. I've done it in every possible mood and in most possible weather, and its value is precisely that it asks nothing and delivers no revelation.

I mention it carefully, because "have you tried going for a walk" is the single most resented sentence in this entire subject, and rightly so when it arrives instead of treatment. It isn't a cure and I've never claimed it. It's a thing I do that is slightly better than not doing it.