I used to think it was something I’d grow out of. It wasn’t. It has a name, ADHD, and on paper it should have made me good at exactly the work that chose me. Creative technology runs on novelty, on high energy, on the childish thrill of showing someone a thing that didn’t exist yesterday. I have all of that in surplus. In an office, performing tasks that were assigned to me, it was my biggest asset. But alone, at my own desk, the same wiring and code that lit me up at the start of a thing quietly walked me away from it before the end. I’d get the idea, build the exciting bit, feel the hit, and drift. Whatever I made stayed mine. It never got finished enough to leave the room.

Here’s the part I’ve never really said out loud. When you fail at the same thing for long enough, it stops being a thing you do and becomes a thing you are. I’m 41. That is probably thirty years of half-built projects, and somewhere along the way I stopped seeing them as bad luck and started reading them as a verdict. Not focused enough. Not specialist enough. Not the kind of person who finishes. That’s the insidious and quiet part of ADHD. There’s definite shame in the hoarded materials to make things, the ‘development’ folder full of abandoned projects and the wasted work. But it’s what the wasted work does to what you think you’re for that really hurts.

Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip that named the exact spot I kept dying in. Everything worth doing starts easy and fun, then hardens into a long, unglamorous slog between starting and making something good. That slog is the Dip. His real point, the one that properly landed, is that the Dip is a filter. The reward on the far side only exists because most people quit before they reach it. I was, without ever having the word for it, a professional quitter. Not of dead ends, of real Dips, the kind with something worth having on the other side. Despite generating what I felt were interesting ideas, I just never once stayed with any long enough to find out what that promised land held.

Something changed this year, and I want to be careful how I say it, because it sounds like an advert and it isn’t. Using AI (Claude Code), I started getting through the Dip. The precise moment I always used to fall off, where the exciting part is done and the hard, boring, complicated middle begins, is where it now sits down next to me and keeps hold of the thread. It won’t let the idea slip while my head wanders off after a shinier one. In the last two months I have pushed three big projects further than I ever have before. Actually finished them ready for release. Not prototypes, not proofs of concept, but working things a stranger could pick up and use. After thirty years, I know exactly how much that sentence is worth.

And it turns out finishing changes more than the tally of finished things. It changes what you’re allowed to be. Every job I ever had was the prototype half of the work: make the idea, prove it’s possible, hand it to someone else to build for real. At Twitter my title was literally Prototype Developer. The job description was, more or less, stop before the hard part. Now I don’t have to stop. I can carry a thing all the way, on my own, from the spark to a person actually holding it. And it isn’t only stuff that exists within screens. The same partnership works with a soldering iron in my hand, wiring up a microcontroller, telling me which components to buy, writing the firmware, drawing the schematic, taking me through it one joint at a time. It doesn’t care that I’m a generalist. It just helps me finish.

I’m writing this down because I don’t think I’m unusual. I think there are a lot of us. People with ADHD, or just restless, idea-rich minds that never fit the shape of a specialist, quietly keeping the same case against ourselves. So this isn’t really a post about a tool. It’s a piece of evidence, and I’m leaving it here on purpose. And I hope it reaches others because I want to show that it IS possible - someone with your exact wiring, who quit in the Dip for thirty years, stayed this time and found out what was on the other side. And if it was possible for me, then the pile of things you think you can’t finish is smaller tonight than it was this morning.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been building:

1. umami.fm is a public, voice-first journal. You record a short spoken note answering the day's prompt, drop it into a themed channel like gratitude, growth, or wonder, and it plays back over a soft music bed alongside everyone else's. It turns daily reflection into something you speak instead of write, like leaving a voicemail for anyone who wants to listen.
   
   The resulting note sounds like a mini podcast. Your own notes can be exported into beautiful videos for social too - I was particularly pleased with how the voice visualiser turned out.

   

2. Juno is a proactive AI accountability coach you talk to through messages and voice. Its core mission is to connect people with themselves and prepare them to think with agility in a dramatically changing world. It builds you a dashboard that surfaces the patterns holding you back alongside your strengths, and sends a daily briefing with your priorities for growth and a personal letter celebrating your wins to keep your spirits up. It adapts its coaching to who you are, starting with AI to build your profile and aiming to connect you with a cohort of real people as you go. Originally I built this for myself but during a trip to NY I pitched it to a friend and I'm excited to now be building this with the amazing Liz Tran, an executive coach to founders and CEOs and author of AQ, whose Agility Quotient framework now shapes how Juno understands each person.

3. DropStore Nookshop is the newest and rawest of the three, a lightweight commerce platform built for one-off runs: a single furniture piece, an art piece, a limited drop, not an ever-refilling catalog. The whole store can be run from a Telegram bot. Add a product by sending a voice note and snapping a photo on your phone, no screens, no dashboard, no UI to fight with.

Somewhere in all this I’ve also been steadily rebuilding something internal; the thing thirty years of unfinished work wore down - my own belief that I could see something through. It’s coming back online, one finished thing at a time, and it’s genuinely changed how I feel about myself.

Unlike before, these days I build in the margins, in nap times and evenings and the odd stolen hour, because I’m the one doing most of the childcare for our 10 month old while my wife runs MØRNING / EVENING and launches a book.

I have less time than I’ve ever had, and I’m somehow making more than I ever did. So I’m reviving this Substack and treating it as a line in the sand. A new era, and for the first time in a while I’m finding myself with more to say.

If your wiring looks anything like mine, come with me. I’ve a strong feeling we’re only at the start of what people like us get to build.

roowilliams

On a raging dopamine high that often lasts around 2 weeks I proudly proclaim to my wife and anyone else that will listen that I'm starting a new project that could lead to the next chapter of my life. I love to list all the reasons why the new thing is the perfect fit for me and is going to lead to greatness. Facebook marketplace sellers are visited, Amazon buttons are clicked and stuff starts arriving in my house - tools, materials. All vital parts to this creative journey.

When I’m not broadcasting why this is the next big thing to other poor souls, I’m soaking up related knowledge—watching YouTube videos in the bath, devouring articles and books on the subject, and following leading voices in the field on social media. I feel like there’s an endless depth to explore, and I can’t get enough. Immersing myself in this rich, primordial soup of ideas, I absorb it all like a compressed sponge, expanding with every drop until I realise I should probably put my phone down and try to sleep.

Then another two weeks later after jumping in and starting work, I've discovered it's actually quite hard and more complicated than the video I'd been playing in my head. "I've a lot of other people doing it and they're so ahead of me."

I've made nothing of any substance other than a half-assed experiment. I've got the ick. Other areas of my life have begun to demand my focus and I am no longer making time to work on my new endeavour.

A week later, a layer of dust has formed on the equipment. If it's not big enough to hide then others have noticed. People can see the neglected workhorse I built to carve wooden bowls on in the garden. Every day, my wife sees the 49-key midi keyboard, audio interface complete with microphone and Korg drum pad on my desk and yet hears only deafening silence when asking about the music I planned to make with it. I deflect any conversation about the new venture, fully aware that I've compiled another starter-kit for a new hobby that I will hoard and try my best not to look at.

And there's many more bundles of project starter-kits around the house. Materials and tools that would allow someone to create something meaningful. There's enough camping and hiking equipment to sustain a venture to the North Pole. All the bike-packing bags you'd need to ride from the UK to Cambodia (plus bike). If I died tomorrow and family had to sort through my belongings they'd find them hidden in cupboards, in storage boxes, in outbuildings and sheds.

Fortunately, I am still very much alive, but their existence brings me great shame.

Shame in that they represent that time in my life where I told everyone I was going to do something I did not. Shame that I cumulatively spent a decent chunk of money acquiring said tools, materials and equipment. Shame in the knowledge that someone really deserving could use that starter kit to create something meaningful. And despite wanting desperately to nourish my soul with acts of creation, a shame that I once again, can't trust in my ability to get anything done outside of work imposed on me by others.

I've been asked by more than a few people if I have ADHD and while I haven't sought an official diagnosis, I have been learning about the condition and have begun view my behaviour through that lens.

And through this lens, I am trying to change things - firstly, by replacing the shame with self-compassion.

For instance, my surges of enthusiasm are important signals for self-discovery. The fact I'm drawn to idea of producing bowls out of the wood that is abundant around me here in the countryside using hand tools isn't without merit - there's a signal in what my brain is telling me when I get excited about something that if followed, will push me towards a life of fulfilment and purpose.

Surviving in this world with ADHD has its challenges, especially when trying to interface with societal systems; school or work in particular. Enduring an education system designed to specialise people and corporate structures that hire people into silos to perform specific functions, I have had a lifelong feeling that I was always a square peg being forced (at school), or potentially forcing myself (at work) through a round hole.

Looking back, I am fortunate that my insatiable curiosity and desire to make has led me to be a person that can flex in their abilities. My previous jobs involved a combination of creativity, technology, making with the benefit of a relatively high level of agency - Creative Technologist at Anomaly and Prototype Developer at Twitter to name a couple. The jobs themselves were always part of a companies innovation efforts, not central to the day-to-day operations of the business. With that potential for creativity and blue sky thinking came instability. They were unstable roles that could be dissolved if the company found itself needing some extra cash. But I managed to make a living, and now, given that the rapidly evolving technology of AI will soon blow a hole in the world of work and make a lot of specialist vocations obsolete, I am grateful for staying as true as I could to the generalist way of being.

But those qualities won't automatically protect me or lead me to a purposeful life…

I framed my 2025 goals broadly as to "become a king and less of a king-maker".

I have reached a time in my life where instead of selling other's ideas, I'm ready to sell ideas of my own. To do that; to produce anything meaningful for myself, as opposed to a client, I will also need to further develop my ability to focus under my own volition.

Structure: A Key Ingredient

Productivity systems are important to any creative pursuit, and particularly for those exhibiting ADHD-like tendencies. As is learning how to work with your own personal rhythms of productivity - creative work requires inspiration, clarity, production and rest. We need to eat and look after our bodies also. Just take a look at these routines of famous creative people.

I already use todo-lists via Todoist app which help in the day-to-day running of my life. I’ve used Trello with Kanban-style "To Do / Doing / Done" lists to manage some projects, but I've tended not to timebox my activities. Writing this, I'm wondering if it's because of a historically bad relationship with deadlines developed by my homework performance at school. I've certainly never implemented a set of macro constraints that help me manage my personal creative output.

But this year I'm determined to work with the natural rhythms that govern my energy. I want to create. To set and fulfil self-initiated projects. I want to revisit each of those starter kits and use them to produce artefacts. Artefacts I can point at that justify the investment in all the tools and materials. Artefacts that generate a practice that leads to further self-understanding and growth towards whatever my brain has been telling me is exciting.

We Evolved with the Seasons

All the above has evidenced that I need structure to reach my goals.

In the spirit of rewilding the mind I look to Mother Nature for inspiration. Her structure comes in the form of seasons. Seasons came before man-made paradigms of time - we evolved with the rhythms of the seasons.

Our ancestors would have hunkered down during the cold and dark winter, probably using as little physical energy as they could to ensure their food stores weren't depleted too quickly. It was a time for reflection, storytelling, being with friends and family, doing small things within a small area.

The brightness of spring would bring new energy, opportunity in cultivating the land, the potential of sowing seeds. Plans and preparation, strengthening, bringing clarity.

Summer, a time of warmth, light and abundance. Creativity, play, celebration, fuelled by all the energy brought by harvesting and feasting on all the fresh juicy fruits and veg grown under a beaming sun. Action; lots of it! The lines blur between outside and in. Longer days, shorter nights. The possibility of extended explorative journeys, bigger projects, greater connectedness.

As the nights shortened and leaves withered, autumn brought the sight of maturing winter squashes. With their tough skins these plants are designed to last and sustain the life around them over a longer period as fresher vegetation dies off thanks to falling temperatures and longer nights. They reminded our ancestors that now was a time to slow down, collect and organise resources, tie up loose ends ahead of another cycle of scarcity brought by the looming winter.

But Then We Changed Our Environments

Our ability to wield fire and then electricity offered a way to change our environments so we were able to live less at the mercy of the seasons. It was immediately obvious what advantages having heat and light offered to domestic living, and eventually corporate enslavement via shift work. But in doing that, we began to cut ties with rhythms that governed our ways of living for all the many years prior. I wonder if the relatively slow speed of our evolution ever caught up? While we expect the same level of productivity from ourselves year round, nothing in nature operates like this. Leaves bud in spring, sprout in summer, wither in autumn and fall in winter.

And while I enjoy building things with code, when the sun is shining it's hard to want to stare at a screen. Instead I want to be hiking up a mountain, riding my bike, tending to the garden, or making wooden bowls outside.

So would an approach to work that considered the seasons provide the structure that could help me harness my potential and chase my many interests in a way that resulted in fulfilment rather than shame?

A Seasonal Model for Creative Work

It sounds simple, and obvious, but when I thought about dividing my creative output up by seasons it brought a strange sense of relief.

While I do have ongoing commitments that are driven by external stakeholders, I'm going to challenge myself to give me a single focus per season.

The Gregorian calendar doesn't directly align with seasons so I'll be using the equinox/solstice dates to help me section the seasonal sprints:

• Spring: Starts around 20 March (Spring Equinox).

• Summer: Starts around 21 June (Summer Solstice).

• Autumn: Starts around 23 September (Autumn Equinox).

• Winter: Starts around 21 December (Winter Solstice).

Each season is roughly 3 months. Given that it's 10th January as I write this, we're a bit under 1/3 into Winter. Hard to believe given our warming climate, I know.

But before I rant on that, what sort of projects would suit each season, and how might I best align them to my numerous hobbies/existing starter-packs?

Winter

As mentioned, reflection, storytelling, being with friends and family, doing small things within a small area. It's hard to be outside and although it's potentially a tenuous link I'm going to equate this with working on my computer. I've been developing an interest in building things using AI and want to understand it further. With a prototyping project already started I'll be working on that for the remainder of this winter.

Spring

Plans and preparation, strengthening, bringing clarity. Feral is the name of my company, but it's also a way of thinking. I've been wanting to rebuild the Feral website, which is super simple right now, and add more content. I've always wanted to run the website from home on my own web server so I can do cool things like power it using solar energy. Of course, I have all the parts needed including a solar panel, solar controller, Raspberry Pi for a server and a car battery as the energy storage.

I want to double down on writing in spring, which I also find to be useful as a tool for mental clarity and defining purpose.

Rather than a single project, spring is going to be a set of projects under one mission which is to strengthen and bring clarity to Feral.

Summer

The time to be outdoor and enjoy expending lots of energy! I do already have plans to tour France in my van this summer, but creatively I want to put the wood carving kit I've acquired to use and produce a collection of bowls using wood from trees that have fallen in the storms this autumn/winter. I would love if this culminated in a mini exhibition, or even became part of a group!

Autumn

Getting back to activities that are cosy. I've really wanted to produce ambient/glitchy electronic music for as long as I can remember. I really do have a midi controller on my desk which is basically a piano-keyboard that doesn't make sound but plugs into your computer to trigger sounds in software running on that. There’s also a Korg drum pad on the little table underneath.

I've owned a midi controller at various stages of my life since I was a teenager and tragically have never finished a single song. Without a doubt, I have to build on what I already know about Ableton Live (complicated music software), music theory and produce an album this autumn.

And what a tactile season for inspiration; for sure will take a mic out into nature and incorporate field recordings from the season into what I make.

Conclusion

The idea of focusing on one project per season is filling me with excitement. There's something powerful about the idea of giving yourself license to mentally step into the world of wood carving or music making for 3 months. There's a little trepidation that I get distracted or something positive happens that changes things, but at least there's a plan. Does it really need to be linked to the seasons to work? Well, it’s worth a punt, and time will tell.

I know that to reach these goals I'll have to make choices about what I'll sacrifice in order to pursue them. But short term sacrifices equals long term gains - that feeling of completing a creative project is incredible and I look forward to more of it.

As we drag ourselves out of this year and into 2025 I’m finding myself in a pivotal stage with my approach to work. Although 2024 has brought me some great projects like Public Map, I am currently shaping some exciting plans for Feral to make money doing more of the things I like.

But for that to happen I need to grow. I need to be more focused. I need to get out of my own way. I need to learn to execute on what I say I will do without procrastinating or falling off.

Then there is the changing cultural and technological landscape. I need to learn how to write more, to create stories, I want to learn how to engage communities, I need to learn how to leverage AI. But I have limited time and there’s usually something needing my visual and physical attention.

Thank fuck for podcasts!

And not just podcasts, but podcasts and audio books. This humble, spoken word format delivers learning in a compacted but digestible way and I love to listen to them. While I struggle to do this at my desk as I’m usually coding or writing, away from my office, in the car, on dog walks or at times where I finally give up and do domestic chores they are the perfect accompaniment to my earbuds. Or so I thought…

I recently noticed I wasn’t making a habit of reaching for my earbuds any time I had a spare bit of time to listen to a podcast and started to interrogate why.

I’d be outside deeply absorbed in a Blindboy podcast while tending the garden, probably doing some ADHD vocal stimming too. Then I’d get a tap on the shoulder from someone delivering a package. Scared the shit out of me.

I’d be listening to Dan Koe drop knowledge bombs while being a perfect little house-husband only to turn around from the sink with a wet spoon in my hand and see my wife coming at me with mild anger having asked a non-critical question and not received a reply.

I’d be on a walk along the local river having ADHD Explained to me but at the same time missing out on all the sounds of birds, the wind through the trees, the sounds of the river babbling over rocks or a rare fish breaching the water’s surface. Not absorbing the full benefits and wonder of that time spent in nature.

Passing people on said walk, I felt more self-conscious with earbuds; I had to stop whatever I was listening to just to hear myself say ‘hello’ and ensure the word came out correctly and with appropriate tone and volume.

I wasn’t enjoying the away-from-desk-earbud-podcast experience anymore.

And, and… they made my ear canal sweaty and I also had this strange feeling the earbuds were affecting my spatial awareness, as if air pressure changes around the ear help with orientation.

What to do?

I’d heard about bone conduction headphones a few years back. They work by sending sound waves along the bones in your jaw almost directly into your head and although they sounded intriguing, I found the price pretty steep and I couldn’t imagine a great sound.

Then one day, I came across the idea of open-ear headphones. Unlike conventional ear buds that go in your ear and plug up the ear canal, these are basically tiny little speakers that hang off the ear and hover just outside the hole leaving space between your earhole and the speaker so that sounds from the outside world can enter too. A simple idea that almost feels like it came before earbuds: let’s dangle tiny speakers off people’s ears! Apparently they’re much better than the bone conduction headphones.

I hopped onto the superstore we all love to hate and saw that Anker’s basic offering had decent reviews and only cost a little more than £30. After conducting a little research on other models including a more premium version from Anker I asked myself, another set of earphone type things? I was doing a decent job of holding off but the idea of them pushing sound waves, laden with knowledge into my brain while I went about my day was quietly eating away at me. One night, I woke from an anxiety dream and reached for my phone. As I peered at the dimly lit screen through one sleepy eye I found myself once again on the Amazon product page…

Waking up in the morning, I felt regret in my belly. I tried to cancel the order but it was too late. The logistics cogs were turning and my cheeky new present to myself was mercilessly navigating the Amazon delivery network towards my front door. I told myself I’d return it once they arrived.

So after three weeks of ownership, how do I feel?

Absolutely no regrets.

As per the title, I’ve been crushing podcasts. I can keep these bad boys ‘on’ (on, not in) all day and barely notice them. My hair’s getting long at the moment so other people don’t notice them either. I can converse, be aware of people entering my personal space, and respond to my wife in a timely manner sometimes. Unlike ear buds or over-ear headphones I don’t get warm, sweaty ears either.

It’s not all good - I don’t rate them for music. I’m no audiophile but compared to earbuds or cans they lack the deep bass and sound a little muddy. But for their intended purpose of delivering me the voices of podcasters and ebook narrators - they’re fantastic. I even tried them up the top of a mountain with constant winds rushing past today and I just had to turn them up a little.

I feel like products rarely blow me away these days but I can safely say that these are the the first product I’ve felt were worth their price since buying a Ninja Foodi. These are the best £30-odd pounds I’ve spent in a long time and I have felt compelled enough by their value to write this blog post and recommend them to you today.

I’ll still hang onto my ear buds and noise cancelling headphones - but they’re reserved for immersive music listening experiences and long plane journeys.

So in a break from the usual anti-capitalist ranting, if you or someone you love likes learning, buy some.

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Writing as a Tool, Not a Product

Since publishing my last blog about hiking the Everest Base Camp trek, I realised I didn't actually want to share it. Not because I didn't want people to read it, but because I don't feel like it gave anyone any takeaways. These days everything seems to be a product. You follow an Instagram account because it's a product. The post history gives you an idea of what to expect, it usually follows a certain subject matter or aesthetic and in following you've decided that feed is going to do some job for you - inspire, motivate, clarify your thoughts, make you laugh. We generally follow creators and social accounts because we have a job to be done and they are able to somehow contribute to doing that job.

My writing doesn't do that. I'm not dropping paradigm shifting insights. I'm not giving you plans on how to get fit. I'm not teaching you how to be a better manager. I am just rambling off into the ether, like a mentally troubled person on the street.

But I'm sort of OK with that, as long as I keep up the writing habit, because it feels like a step in the journey of becoming a smart and articulate person that can easily communicate their ideas or thoughts on a subject. As with all things, I know the writing will get easier the more I practice, my thinking will be clearer, and I know that the output will be less meta and more resonant with things I am doing.

And yet somehow, some people made it through my last blog. I imagine it's just because they know me personally and are being supportive. Either way, I appreciate that (and offer a tiny apology).

Creating content online used to feel more experimental to me. More like a journal. There was less jeopardy. Less pressure to write as a product. So at the risk of going against modern expectations I'm going to write like no one's reading and not push myself too hard to get the output to fit that archetype, at least for now.

So aside from thinking through the icky feeling that I hope I've processed a little above, I've also kept myself busy between my last blog and this by starting a building project: a covered garden gazebo. I'd been going at this project with any spare time I had, and this blog probably would not be getting written were it not for a break in this mode of productivity forced by a trip to NYC. So here I am, sat in Telegraphe Cafe off of 18th St and 6th Ave reflecting and blogging.

Building The Inside, Outside

Back home, in Wales, it is rainy. It rained non-stop last winter and in quantities more I'd ever known. Because I live in the countryside that meant a lot of mud. Walks in nature become difficult with slick, slippery paths and mud puddles that swallow your boots. The dog and her little stick legs get covered in mud. That covers your car seats in mud. Your garden becomes a squishy sponge. Even on the dry days, everything is damp. Being outside is a bit of a struggle.

But I love being outside. I love outdoor cooking. I love doing messy craft projects that cause wood shavings to fly everywhere. I like doing gardening things. I want to continue doing that stuff even when it rains.

Traditional Japanese houses had an entire covered area at the entrance with a floor made of dry, compacted earth called a "doma". Its rough meaning is "a space that makes the indoors the same as the outdoors" and it formed a sort of porch before you stepped up onto the raised main floor. In this space, the houses's occupants would do 'dirty work' like washing vegetables, cooking and carpentry projects.

While I would love to replicate this directly and make the area next to our home entrance completely covered, I had to work within the confines of a house that is rented and use existing infrastructure.

So I decided to take down and break up an existing pergola that covered a patio in our garden and build a gazebo. The difference between a pergola and gazebo is this - a pergola just offers shade with a slatted roof that usually has plants encouraged to grow across it. A gazebo has a solid roof that will protect underneath from rain and sun apparently. Ours will have a clear roof so there will still be light, but it will create an outdoor space sheltered from the elements.

Building it Cheaply but Properly

While people do build these structures using premium cedar or oak beams, I sourced the bulk of my materials from Facebook Marketplace. I scored some treated wood, 3m long fence posts for £10 a piece which was a bargain. I got a bunch of 4m long pieces to create the rafters for a similar bargain price. With many large infrastructure projects going on around my house, particularly in the South Wales valleys, there are often excess materials that workers take home and I suspect that's how this timber finds its way on Marketplace.

Knowing the material sizes and area I had to work in, I was able to start mocking up a design in a 3D CAD application. Building it in this digital space gave me a good sense for how it would look and makes calculating measurements and angles at build time a breeze.

While I was familiar with wood working, I'd never done anything that involved concrete, and due to this structure having a covered roof that would act effectively as a sail in the wind, it would need some solid concrete footings to save it from shaking loose. I had to lift patio slabs and dig down 45cm and pour a concrete into these holes. 45cm is advised to be below the frost line in my area. Earth is permeable to water but when you pour concrete into a hole in the earth you create a barrier that stops its movement. That water collects around the concrete mass, hugging the sides and bottom of it and then when the weather gets below freezing, that water can freeze, expand and begin to gradually loosen the earth around the concrete leading to instability and movement that will inevitably affect the structure above ground. No bueno. Ensuring you dig below the frost line means that the water down there should never freeze and so your footing will remain stable.

The building process felt very primitive and raw to me. You mark out an area using string wrapped around sticks. You measure and mark the level of the ground using sticks banged into it. You're mixing sand and stones and cement at a rough ratio to make the concrete. You stick together pieces of wood to make a mould if you need to shape the concrete.

I had to lift the patio slabs, chisel a hole in the existing concrete slab that held the slabs, dig the 45cm holes in a mix of soil and sometimes very hard clay, pour the concrete, sit a mould collar on top to make a nice square shape that I could fit the slabs back to, insert the brackets and get them level, wait for it to cure, cut the slabs to fit using an angle grinder, relay then and re-point them which was adding concrete around the slab perimeters. The process took me around 3 days and resulted in my having some brackets cast into concrete footings. A lot of work for what seems like a small output but now it's done properly, and should last.

The resulting structure at this stage is solid but due to the footings being a little flexible, is able to wobble when shook. It turns out these footings are better for lean-to gazebos - structures that are build off another solid structure that resists lateral forces, like a house. So the next stage on this project involves me drilling some holes in the walls of the adjacent shed, bonding some iron bar into it and then connecting these to my gazebo structure to increase stability.

Ideally I would have cast the fence posts directly into the concrete instead of using the footings. The downside is that the footings would harbour water around them and so eventually succumb to rot, so I haven't completely messed up by doing it in the way I have and I look forward to solving the problem using my iron bar solution.

Curiosity and Learning New Things

As usual I considered the fading relevance of of societies educational institutions as I learned how to do all these new things through the teachings of passionate people publishing YouTube videos, with the occasional questions fired over to my father-in-law who is a civil engineer and my friend Dean Kahlil who is a builder by trade but also draws and paints as an artist. A rare breed indeed.

On discovering my electric chop saw was too small to deal with the 100 x 100mm fence posts, I even learned how to cut wood straight and square using a hand saw!

The wooden structure came together in a few days and was pretty straight forward apart from a few design tweaks made along the way as I saw it materialise.

As mentioned, I'd never done any of this stuff, and I did it single handedly. With an abundance of information readily available at our fingertips, the ability to be curious and set a project for oneself seems to be the most important skill of our time, and one that I hope new school curriculums are promoting. I can say for sure that my school experience valued conformity over innovation and I am still working through the process of learning how to set myself projects and get them done.

Indeed, I hope that you, reader, live your life in a way that values and honours your curiosity by listening to your heart and learning into whatever excites you, even if it does deviate from what would be considered the norm amongst your peer group or within your lifestyle.

As a society, we’ve never had so much potential.

As we hiked we passed by beautiful forests of rhododendron and pine all the while nestled within the snow-covered peaks that hinted of the terrain (and cold) to come.

The weather was perfect, clear blue skies for most of the journey. But for me the beauty was marred by some direct observations of the effect of tourism on this area.

We know that like all industries, tourism can lead to exploitation, social and infrastructural problems beyond what I witnessed. This is just an account of my direct observations, thoughts and feelings of being a tourist participating in the Everest Base Camp hike.

We were not alone on this trail. A hosts of services had sprung up to facilitate and take advantage of the influx of comparatively well-off tourists. Aside from us and the other kitted-out visitors, we passed by high-altitude porters carrying massive loads; some the size of a king-sized beds and weighing more than the carrier.

These people made a small living ferrying resources up and down the trail and with money being tight, did so with little resources. I witnessed some wearing nothing more than shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops, despite the cold. Ourselves and the surrounding tourists were kitted out in high-tech layers, thermal gloves, Goretex boots and wrap-around eyewear that by comparison, justified an expedition to Mars. As I noticed a straggly piece of nylon rope wrapped around the sole of one of the porters flip-flops to give the wearer some grip on icy paths I felt an equal mix of shame in my privilege of wealth and admiration for the low-tech intervention.

We frequently had to step aside for chains of hard-working animals - yaks and their smaller relatives, jhopkya who relentlessly ambled by. These load carrying animals were equipped with frames strapped to their solid bodies via ropes that had worn the fur off their skin and had turned their callouses into living leather. Pushed by a human barking commands aggressively they had no choice but to haul everything from many crates of bottled water to coffee machines up and down the mountain, day in and day out. All to service the tourist industry of which I was now a part.

One of the moments that stuck with me came after hiking up the side of a steep forest until we reached a plateau that had been developed with toilets and a retaining wall.

The wall formed a sort of amphitheater and after using the toilet and waiting for the others, you would find yourself in the centre. Sat around the wall were local women dressed in pretty much the same garb. There was a tension in the air as we stood waiting and as I looked around I realised why. Each of these women had a sheet spread out beside them with almost identical products laid out for sale. To my dismay, these were western products; bottles of Coca Cola, Fanta, Sprite. Mars and Snickers bars. No home made sweet treats or foods of the area, just western, processed crap. Here I really felt a cascade of the effects of capitalism. With each of them selling the exact same thing and so desperately looking at us to buy, who did we choose? The old lady, the young women, the one closest to you? They must have known each other but in this moment they were silently competing in the market. It felt like a thought experiment or a riddle, and the tension was being created not only between them, but between us and them. A few of us bought some junk, Mars bars and such. I felt so icky that although I wanted a way to support these ladies, I couldn't bring myself to buy anything.

I walked the rest of that day's hike trying to reconcile what I felt. Had it have been better if they had sat together, pooled their offerings and shared the earnings? The fact that it was all western stuff. I imagined an alternative with them all coming together to make some sort of local snack and selling that instead... I’d have gone for it! Perhaps they'd tried that but the tourists historically hadn't been interested so they'd just resorted to offering familiar (to tourists), shelf-stable, processed food. I’d learned about the breaking down of a community thanks to the arrival and influence of western capitalism via a documentary called The Economics of Happiness produced by Local Futures. Perhaps I was projecting what I had learned onto this situation but for some reason it had bothered me and I could viscerally feel how capitalism breaks down culture and communities.

Wherever there are people consuming, there will be rubbish/trash. It was hid in ditches just off the trail and thrown into cages and burned in the towns. The vast majority of it being plastic water bottles. Even in places where the water flowed freely and was filtered the preference was for tourists to buy bottled. This was framed as a health concern and while it would indeed minimise the risk of waterborne illness which is a benefit when in a remote place with little access to medical support, I couldn't help but notice the way it commoditised a freely available resource and created another revenue stream. Putting money into that economy for fresh drinking water if something I'd be happy to do, it was just a shame it involved struggle for the yaks that carried it and resulted in a load of plastic waste that had to be processed.

I hope this critique doesn't come across as ungrateful. I had an amazing time with the guys on the trip and I felt lucky to be there. Doing the Everest Base Camp hike is literally a peak life event for me and many others that are lucky enough to do it. Aside from the epic landscapes, I met some lovely doggos and enjoyed learning about the resourcefulness of the people that lived and worked up there.

Energy was scarce - where the altitude was so great that trees would no longer grow, yak dung was used as fuel for warmth and cooking. Solar energy was harnessed - arrays of black pipes were mounted on the roofs of guest houses and homes as a way to conduct heat from the sun into water for showers. Mirrored parabolic dishes sat in the yards of tea houses focusing the warmth of the sun onto large kettles. Photovoltaic panels were used to provide electricity for lighting and communications - even WiFi. Rugged plants were grown as food and potatoes seemed to be a staple. The immediate landscape was bleak. The cold omnipresent and I appreciated the resilience of those that inhabited areas above the tree line.

That's it for this week.

I actually intended this article to skim over my Everest Base Camp experience and to introduce an observation on souvenirs for tourists as a way in to talking about local crafts. It was originally titled "Local Craft Resurgence"... now I've gotta think of a new title. I am using writing as a tool for processing and self discovery so I'm happy to be scrappy and go with whatever needs to come out at this stage.

Looking forward to writing about local crafts next week. Thanks for reading.

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This latest fad started when I saw an Instagram post of a guy literally sprinting across some rocks not wearing any shoes and I was inspired. He's got an always-on, always available pair of sneakers built right into his foot. I want in.

So I began; at first just a few awkward and shaky steps outside my house. While that sounds trivial, my lovely house is surrounded in a moat-like fashion with very angular stone chippings. I really felt each step, especially when a stone was orientated in a way that made it stand a lot prouder than its peers. Oooh, it gets right in there. Just like a foul Lego brick.

But then I began to notice things about the terrain I was engaging with. Such as these stones flattened out when I reached the place where cars are parked and thus became much more pleasant to walk on. Not stride-inducing, but not bad. I continued across them until I reached the soil that forms the border of my vegetable garden and I immediately felt relief as my foot settled on the warm earth. It's currently summer in Britain - and I use the seasonal term lightly for thanks to a kink in the jet stream placing it directly above the UK it has been a turbulent summer of rainy, windy, cold and cloudy conditions with just the odd sunny day. But right now it's dry and I've found that this radiantly warm soil is my favourite substrate to walk on, of all that I have tried so far.

And I have tried a few. While visiting Montana recently for and @laz_d wedding we were staying on a lovely permaculture farm. Far from the meteorological effects of the jet stream we were basking in temperatures upward of 30 degrees celsius (As a UK resident I appreciated this).

With the wedding featuring a subtle wellness and spiritual spin there was a part to the weekend where as guests, we were all introduced to the concept of 'a vow of silence' and asked to try it out for ourselves. This lasted a few hours and I wont lie, as a person with ADHD, I was slightly worried about disrupting it. So, instead of becoming the guy that distracted everyone during this period I decided to create another layer to this experience and not only be silent, but take the vow to walk around barefoot for that time. I decided to walk a little out of the farm, through a small pine forested trail and up a hill that overlooked it. While it was lovely to move silently through the landscape observing birds and beetles I enjoyed the varied feelings on my feet as I traversed the trail gave my attention to the places that were damp, dry, cool or warm. It reminded me of observing microclimates while studying for my Permaculture Design Certificate. I made the 3 or 4 hours of silence without distracting anyone and felt like a true adult.

After the wedding's conclusion, my wife, our friend Sam and I went to stay in a lovely wooden cabin on the West side of Yellowstone National Park. We'd planned to make the most of our flight out there and take a 'working holiday' spending a week working in the mornings while our colleagues in the UK were still clocked in and use the afternoons to explore or work on personal projects. That led to two more larger barefoot walks. We'd decided to meet the bride, groom and their family in Yellowstone Park and so the first time was bare-footing with the groom, another endlessly curious mind who asked me lots of questions about my intention to train my feet and was attracted to the idea of being more present with each step. We walked back from the upper viewing point of the beautiful Grand Prismatic Spring. The second time I was out for an out-and-back hike with Lydia and Sam along a stunning river and while I'd walked the in portion with shoes, I'd walked back carrying them. I was noticeably a little slower, especially on the sections with loose stones, than my trainer-clad company but I did feel the accomplishment of covering the full 2.5 miles.

After all this and with the vision of being a person that could someday sprint across rocks on his tippy toes I was wondering if I was making any progress on the physical condition of my feet. Then today, I noticed I had a thorn in my foot - and I didn't even know. I mean, I think I remember it being a little sore in that specific area of my foot in the evening after my silent session of bare-footing at the wedding farm but it had quickly faded away. Now here was the culprit - lodged in the bottom of my foot and not causing any painful sensations. It was just suspended there in calloused skin. This felt like a minor breakthrough, it's almost as if it were just in the bottom of my shoe. The skin on the bottoms of my feet are thickening and becoming soles... yay.

The skin may be toughening but it doesn't desensitise the many nerves in the bottom of your feet. I still very much feel stones, especially if they are loosely spread across a surface vs gravel where there are lots. Walking across them requires a level of meditation whereby you are able to mentally desensitise the area. Maybe it is a spiritual thing for me after all? I also have to be conscious to try and relax my body and breathe normally as I found that my muscles would tense up in anticipation of each step. I have read that with enough practice, your brain 'clicks' and learns to filter out the signals. I'm not quite there yet, but I'll keep at it.

So am I going to be barefoot any time you see me now? Well... no.

I used to have a manager that would go running barefoot in and around Soho, London during lunch times which left me with a cognitive dissonance swirl of equal parts admiration and disdain with a thin seam of 'ick' between the two. Yes this is how nature intended but also, those streets hide broken glass, vomit, needles and other things that you wouldn't want going beyond the skin barrier to your soft and fluid inner.

Unlike my brave manager mentioned above, I can't ever see me ever doing this in a social setting unless it's 'funtime vibes'. I just recalled convincing a group of people to take their shoes off and enjoy barefoot dancing on the grass at the wedding afterparty. I do still want to wear my best trainers; one must preserve their status and display tribal cues within the cesspool of consumer culture. Barefoot is a social cue unto itself and I'd assume that said manager may have had a few conversations with other curious or like-minded individuals while out on the streets with his naked feet but for me it's just not what I want to represent day-to-day.

But I do look forward to having the ability to walk on anything. Just for shits and giggles… Why not? And it would be great if more people did it from time to time, because it's important to recognise that all able-bodied humans have the potential to walk on any terrain without footwear. It's inherently part of us and like all self-development, it just takes practice to strengthen and condition our way to making the most of what has always been there all along.