I wanted to listen to Fantastic Mr Fox.

The music had stopped—no more Cat Stevens or Elton John—and the silence of the French countryside felt heavy.

It was time for my favourite story. I hoped my mother would understand that by not asking I was silently begging.

“Phew! This is hard work. Is it much further, dad?”

“Keep digging, son”, Mr Fox would say and then I’d mimic the child fox’s voice and everyone would laugh.

The B-side was shorter than the A-side of the cassette, so for a while we rolled on through the French countryside, with only the noise of the car’s rolling wheels to fill the void between My Lady Durbanville and potentially Roald Dahl.

I looked at my sister to my right. She looked out of the window. I hoped she would want Fantastic Mr. Fox on too but I wasn’t really sure how much she liked it. She was only three and wasn’t much of a conversationalist. She couldn’t read yet either.

The noiseless tape played on and then my mother turned her head to us both in the back seat. I wondered if my mother was going to offer us a drink. Big bottles of Coke often appeared from nowhere on long drives—the kind you never saw at home.

My sister continued to gaze out of the window and I looked at my mother in anticipation. She fixed me with a knowing look. I was fairly certain, she was going to put my favourite story tape on, “You’re a good boy, you know. And so are you, Rebecca.”

My sister didn’t seem to notice that she’d been praised or accidentally been called a boy.

I waited.

I pretended to look out of the opposite window to Rebecca’s and my mother pulled her head away and reclined in her seat. My father continued to drive, lost in his own thoughts.

I was still waiting.

She turned back to us again.

A pause.

“I wonder what you two’d do if I died”.

My world crashed. Fantastic Mr. Fox didn’t mean a thing. I felt my throat constrict and fought for air and then my eyes creased up and I began to blubber.

Silently at first.

My mother caught my eye and I looked at her pleadingly.

Subscribe now

Inside I was screaming, “Mummy, don’t leave us. I love you. I need you. What can I do? I’ll look after you. I promise. I’ll do anything!”

My mother seemed to sense what I was articulating within.

She held my gaze for a second longer than felt comfortable. She then turned to Rebecca, who was still staring into space, pensive.

Rebecca, fixed my mother in the eye.

My father whispered, “Stop it, Sheila.” And with his left hand pressed her gently back into her seat, facing forward.

I was sobbing uncontrollably and then a little voice on my right, asked, “who’d make our tea?”. She blinked a few times and then nodded off.

I pretended to be asleep and wept silently until it went dark and I too fell asleep.

We never did get to hear Fantastic Mr Fox.

This Substack is reader-supported. If you’ve read this far, please support my writing by clicking the purple button below. If you can’t afford that, please subscribe, comment or restack.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

More like this:

“England won the football last night, and thank goodness they did,” Reform MP Sarah Pochin tweeted, the day after England beat Croatia 4-2 during the recent World Cup.

She continued, “Because on the occasions that England lose their football matches, the incidences of domestic violence go through the roof. So boys, keep winning.”

To provide some context, in 2015, the Home Office presented data to Parliament stating that police had received nearly 900,000 phone calls reporting domestic abuse in England and Wales in 2013/14, resulting in approximately 72,000 convictions^. By March 2025, the landscape had clearly changed. The Office for National Statistics testifies that police recorded 816,493 crime reports, resulting in just 41,070 convictions.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is alive and well in our society. Bridget Phillipson MP, the Equalities Minister, says that British society has ‘normalised racism and sexism’. Pochin’s comments, while probably well-intended, were naïve and insensitive at best, but they actually put meat on the bones of Phillipson’s argument.

What both women were acknowledging is that domestic violence and sexual assault are an undeniable reality. The media routinely sensationalises crime and looks for scapegoats, which invariably means ethnic minorities. This is neither accurate nor helpful in addressing an evil that pervades every social class, every ethnic group and every postcode.

VAWG, when a man decides to assert physical gender control, is often normalised through learned experience in the home and systemic institutional indifference. To sum up: “men have always hit women. It’s hard to prove. So, what’s for breakfast?”

***

Roddy Doyle’s 1996 novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, was narrated by a woman called Paula Spencer. In the book, her husband, Charlo asks her how she got the bruises that he had given her, and she matter-of-factly replies, “I walked into a door”.

I always wonder if she told him that because he had trained her to say it, if she didn’t want to rankle him further, or if out of habit, she said it on autopilot.

Possibly all three have truth in them, but Paula is hardly unique. Walking into doors and falling down stairs have almost become a cliché. Paula is visibly injured, and when someone enquires, she attempts to rationalise it, carries the shame, and moves on. Meanwhile, the person who asked rarely believes the explanation, but as Paula isn’t making a fuss about it, they turn a blind eye. It has been normalised, as Bridget Phillipson suggests.

Governments have never denied that VAWG is a problem: In 2015, David Cameron’s government brought radical changes in recognising domestic abuse.

Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 made coercive and controlling behaviour, which established patterns of abuse, a criminal offence. Prior to that, a woman could only report individual attacks if she had physical evidence. What a woman could not do was prove that she was living in daily fear. The well-meaning Section 76 acknowledged that domestic violence rarely comes out of the blue. Over time, coercive males strip away the confidence of a woman until they know she will likely accept a physical escalation and tell everyone she walked into a door.

The problem with the law recognising repeated coercive and demeaning behaviour as abuse is that it is virtually impossible to prove. This possibly explains the widening gap between reports of domestic abuse and successful prosecutions. Unfortunately, when an alleged abuser has a 95% chance of escaping justice, there is little deterrent and violent attacks increase.

Statistically, the system (medical, legal and social) rarely believes Paula and is therefore complicit in her silence.

Women’s growing assertiveness in recent decades, fuelled by feminism, TV dramas about domestic violence and public awareness campaigns like #MeToo, has given more women the courage to contact the police. Allowing for the potential for anomalies, the vagueness of the new laws has arguably made convictions drop.

But legislation alone is not to blame. Our prisons are overcrowded; we have overworked police officers who often don’t follow up on perceived ‘non-serious crime’. Additionally, systemic delays and court backlogs mean that even if someone is charged with a crime, they may wait two years before appearing in court. Bruises fade, statements get changed, further abuse takes place, and in the interim many complainants withdraw their complaints out of fear of violence escalating. In short, crimes are logged but rarely prosecuted.

These essays take hours of research, drafting, and editing every week. If ‘The Woman Who Walked Into Doors’ gave you something to ponder on your morning walk, you can support the page by clicking below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

It’s always greatly appreciated.

***

Bridget Phillipson’s comments on the normalisation of misogyny in contemporary Britain are valid but short of pronouncements of draconian internet regulation; what can government do? Effective censorship would need a concerted global effort. A UK ban can easily be circumvented by a simple VPN, so people can access misogynistic hatred from another country.

Online influencers like the Tate brothers have monetised misogyny and created large fortunes. Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan target vulnerable young, socially ostracised males.

But is this a uniquely modern phenomenon?

In the 1940s, Charles Atlas created an ad with the slogan, “Tired of getting sand kicked in your face?” In the graphic, a scrawny man is being bullied on the beach, and underneath the image there was contact information for a body-building programme.

Today, social media and podcasts do the same thing on an industrial level.

Disenfranchised youths form ‘communities’, which frequently lay the blame on women for them not being able to get girlfriends. The Tate brothers (currently being extradited to the UK to face charges of violence against women) cash in on these so-called ‘incels’ pushing the trope that the key to a happy, healthy life is to prove they are dominant and strong.

This spills over into real-world hostility towards female teachers, police officers and medical professionals. Gone are the days of mildly patronising casual sexism – this is sexism on steroids – that fossilises hostility to half of the population, setting a precedent for norms in personal relationships.

***

Rather than face the root causes of crime, we prefer crude analyses of criminal data. In our Post-Truth society, misinformation spreads easily online, and many of our newspapers and politicians lazily adopt the populist narrative. Facts are out of fashion.

A recent study published by King’s College London and YouGov showed an alarmingly inaccurate perception of who is committing crime among the adult British population.

The general perception, fuelled by media and Sarah Pochin’s Reform Party, is that most violent crime is almost exclusively carried out by foreign nationals. This fixation, sparked by the immigration and small boats crisis, is the food and drink of the populist right.

The majority of Britons believe that reported crime in England and Wales is rising, whereas the opposite is in fact happening. The study showed that right-leaning respondents are far more likely to believe that there is a surge in violent crimes among non-whites. Reform voters, in particular, perceive that 30% of violent crime is committed by non-whites – the real figure is 15% according to the available data.

Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, and his ilk fill social media with slogans such as “for the sake of our women and children” – a thinly veiled accusation that British women and children are not safe from asylum seekers, the broader Muslim population and foreigners in general.

By whipping up this rhetoric and creating scapegoats, we are radicalising both the anti-immigrant right and the ‘woke’ left. Protests and counter-protests overstretch police resources in our polarised society. And while this happens, reports of VAWG are shelved, and more women suffer in their own homes across every single demographic.

***

Violence against women and girls, as Phillipson and Pochin acknowledge, is a genuine problem. There are thousands of real-life Paula Spencers.

It is phenomenally difficult to change human behaviour, but one step towards it would be to dismantle the myths. External triggers to explain male violence, such as sport, social media algorithms, and foreigners, are not the primary threat. We need to provide more services for abused women and girls and confront the systemic failings in the justice system that allow abusers to act with near impunity. For too long we have ignored the door that Paula Spencer walked into – now we need to focus on who pushed her.

Subscribe now

If you’ve read this so far, you will enjoy the following:

and

The three-pointed silver star on my car key ring is supposed to represent land, sea, and stars: automotive dominance. I giggle to myself bitterly as I look at it on the table next to my phone and wallet. My Mercedes key ring is deceptive; it belongs to a 22-year-old, battered A160 hatchback with heart problems and rude pictures etched into the dust on the back window. The toilet is still leaking.

I can’t ignore either anymore. Yet a part of me longs to do just that. Of course, I would love to have a functioning car and a silent toilet, but that is not really the issue.

Subscribe now

When I was learning to drive, my father asked me to read something in the manual, which I cautiously did: “Check the fuel gauge and…” I pronounced gauge more like ‘gorge’ than ‘gage’. He practically self-combusted.

“Do you do this on purpose to wind me up?” he bellowed. “You did this when I showed you how to wire a plug for the dozenth time!”

But I didn’t do it on purpose. I still can’t remember the order of wires in a plug, and while I can assume he must have told me what a fuel gauge was on many occasions, I must have been thinking about Neanderthals, Norman castles, or Nirvana.

You see, somewhere along the line I had equated not understanding electricity, atoms, or trigonometry with being a failure.

We spend around two months a year on the island of Crete. It is simply paradise. Unfortunately, due to the UK losing Freedom of Movement, we cannot simply live here permanently, and car ownership becomes complicated. The workaround was to ‘permanently borrow’ a car that is insured for any driver and hope that the car doesn’t get itself into trouble.

The battered old banger has saved us a fortune in car rentals over the last three years, but recently it started making alarming sounds like a ticking Nazi motorcycle. Life as the primary driver is a perpetual balance of hope and denial, but when it recently cut out on a steep hill, we just about managed to crawl to a pub at 8 km/h just to use the Wi-Fi for an emergency call. Before we could even get out, the engine miraculously spluttered back to life—but we both knew we hadn’t fixed anything. We’d merely postponed the inevitable.

That night we were invited to a rather raucous affair at the local taverna, and the next morning it took three alarms before we could drag the car down to Babis—the wonderfully kind auto-electrician and fixer of multiple past problems.

We dropped it off and went for breakfast. When he called us back to his shop, he smiled like a supportive parent after a bitterly disappointed child fails to make the football team, telling us we needed a Mercedes specialist in the city. Babis is always calm and reassuring, but when he charged us nothing for checking the oil and water, we realised he just didn’t have the heart to ask us for money. He knew.

The next morning, freshly detoxed, we set off early and found the city workshop. It lacked the calm chaos of Babis’ shop. The mechanic, eating a bagel with oily fingers as he shrugged and tutted through our questions, filled me with immediate dread.

He explained that we needed new fuel injectors, but whether one, two, three, or four, he couldn’t say. I had ball-parked that 600 euros was doable, but anything more would see the car at the scrap yard before you could say Jack Robinson. To even test them, he explained, meant removing them and replacing them with new ones. My quick mental calculation landed over €2,500—roughly 50% more than the car was worth. My brain began spiralling with numbers, airport runs, car rentals, and shipping logistics.

Meanwhile, my wife was focusing on the actual mechanism. I understand “fuel” and I know what “injection” means, but I had no idea what a fuel injector looked like, where it lived, or if you could safely eat one. My wife started asking questions while the psychedelic fairground music of The Magic Roundabout flooded my head.

I was lost and scared. I watched her fluently speaking Mechanicese—asking the exact sort of questions I would ask if a laptop refused to boot or a cursor vanished from a screen. The questions that come naturally when you already understand the language.

Each exchange made me panic more. How could she ask these things and understand the answers? I was a spectator in my own chaos, standing pale like an empty shell, longing to go home and hide from the adults.

The embarrassing thing is that this isn’t unfamiliar territory. I can map out retirement funds or cook a meal for ten guests, but if the boiler stops working at home, I call my wife so she can patiently instruct me to turn the black knob until the gauge (ha!) reaches 1.5. After several dozen calls, I can mostly manage it on my own now.

Fortunately, she finds this endearing—if bewildering. I don’t descend into panic and shame around her because she knows my chaotic brain works either at cyber-speed or barely registers reality at all. I admire her calm, practical ability to think through a technical problem.

But in my mind, the car was already scrapped and I had jumped three months ahead. As she code-switched from mechanics to money, I snapped at her. I tell myself I’m a “big-picture thinker,” but sometimes that’s just a flattering way of saying I get impatient with details. She didn’t deserve it, but in auto-panic, my brain had already held a manic board meeting, rejected every proposal, and moved on to damage control.

We got home and I fell asleep within minutes. If I hadn’t, I knew I’d be unbearable, she’d be hurt, and my shame would poison the rest of the holiday.

When I woke up, the air felt different. Rationality returned: I am not completely useless. Where people, non-mechanical systems, language, or creative problem-solving are concerned, I actually like my brain. I understand literature, history, and people. I’m good with numbers and mental arithmetic. When my wife’s computer glitched, I fixed it instantly—no panic.

What is the common link? I found myself asking. How stupid am I? How bright am I?

My mind is like a teenager’s bedroom, but I just about know where everything is. I make split-second decisions on whether something is “for me.” I spend hours falling down rabbit holes on subjects I care about. I am a non-linear thinker; I isolate variables, link ideas across my swirling brain, and figure out how to make them funny or accessible.

And yet: I can’t wire a plug, picture what an engine does, or execute abstract mathematics. People assume I am either exceptionally bright or mentally deficient, depending entirely on the topic. The truth is, both are accurate. It’s the same brain, but competence doesn’t always transfer.

A mechanic hears a fuel injector; I hear a World War II motorcycle. When we get lost, my wife constructs a map in her mind; I get lost in the landscape, or notice the stranger giving us directions has an unusual accent or an interesting scar. A musician hears harmony; a historian hears patterns.

We’re all natives somewhere and foreigners somewhere else. The humiliation only comes when we’re suddenly illiterate in someone else’s language.

I spent years thinking I was defective because I couldn’t read some gauges, forgetting that I was reading thousands of others all the time.

This Substack is reader-supported. That means if you like what you read and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. by clicking the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Subscribe now

Carol Vorderman, the TV presenter and the late Barbara Windsor star of the Carry On raunchy comedy films and Eastenders have several striking similarities on the surface. Both have proved themselves to be courageous and resilient women in a male dominated media. Both moved from mere celebrity to beloved institutions in the UK. Both became sex symbols. Both have been candid about their slightly unconventional private lives. Neither feared being seen as “sexy” in their seventh decade, and both received copious media and public scrutiny as a result.

Yet Britain embraced one as a national treasure until the day she died, while one has fallen from universal grace as if she had committed some kind of mortal sin.

Why?

The online treatment of Vorderman—with constant “slut-shaming” and sexually explicit comments—is something that Windsor never had to deal with. Perhaps Vorderman would have fared better had social media not existed. There is unquestionably an online obsession with the glamorous Vorderman. She frequently labels this as sexism, and, of course, it would be completely absurd to deny that sexism plays a massive part in this. No man would ever have to endure years of comments about his appearance, his body, his age, and his perceived promiscuity.

But sexism alone cannot explain the difference in the public perception of both women. Barbara Windsor was glamorous, flirtatious, and hardly conventional by any metric. Her private life with celebrities, gangsters, and much younger men was splashed across the tabloids for decades. Yet she remained, somehow, everyone’s beloved “Babs.”

If the sexism narrative can appear a little simplistic, perhaps it lies somewhere else.

Britain is remarkably tolerant of almost anyone, provided they stay in the category we’ve mentally filed them under.

Barbara Windsor spent a lifetime inhabiting a role the public understood instinctively. She was the cheeky Cockney. Warm, funny, glamorous, slightly naughty, but ultimately reassuring. Even the more colourful aspects of her private life somehow reinforced the character people already believed they knew. She never appeared to challenge the caricature. She embraced and perfected it.

Carol Vorderman did the opposite.

She entered our living rooms in the 1980s as the giggling maths genius on Countdown, astonishing viewers by turning impossible combinations of numbers into elegant solutions before anyone else had found a calculator. She was “the bird with brains”: attractive enough to grace magazine covers, clever enough to leave most of us feeling inadequate, and self-deprecating enough to make both qualities seem charming rather than intimidating.

Britain knew exactly where to put her.

The problem was that she refused to stay in that box. She transformed herself from nerdy-pretty to full-on glamour in middle age without ever surrendering her intellect. She spoke openly about relationships that ignored conventional expectations. She embraced social media, challenged politicians, campaigned on issues she cared about, and refused to apologise for any of it.

The public reaction changed.

These essays take hours of research, drafting, and editing every week. If ‘The Trouble With Carol Vorderman’ gave you something to ponder on your morning walk, you can support the page by clicking below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

It’s always greatly appreciated.

Suddenly, the conversation was no longer about mathematics or broadcasting. It became about cosmetic surgery, ageing, her body, her sex life, and endless demands that she should “stick to maths.” It was as though Britain admired her intelligence right up until the moment she started using it to express opinions of her own.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect we misunderstand authenticity. We say we admire people for being themselves, but to what extent do we really mean that? Perhaps we mean that we actually admire people who remain recognisably the version of themselves we first encountered. “Good old Babs” works; “Good old Vorders” sounds absurd.

Perhaps what we really demand is not authenticity, but legibility.

We like public figures whose identities can be summarised in a single sentence:

• Barbara Windsor: The cheeky Cockney actress.

• Carol Vorderman: The glamorous maths genius.

• Gary Lineker: The footballer turned skilled television presenter.

The trouble begins when those people insist on becoming more than one thing.

Lineker was loved for his fair-mindedness and decency on the field, and then admired for his intellect on screen. Yet, when Lineker started using that decency and intelligence thatwe loved him for to speak publicly about refugees, racism, and climate change, thousands responded with exactly the same complaint levelled at Vorderman:

“Stick to football.”

It is, fundamentally, the same sentence. It is not an argument against what they are saying. It is an insistence that they have wandered outside the role society allocated to them. How dare they?

Former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner sometimes attracts a similar response. Her politics undoubtedly divide opinion, but much of the commentary directed at her seems strangely disconnected from policy. Dancing in Ibiza, smoking outside, laughing too loudly, looking as though she enjoys herself, and the bizarre, outrageously sexist view that a teenage mother should not morally be in public office—these become matters of public outrage in a way they rarely do for male politicians.

Again, it feels less like disagreement than discomfort. Had she succeeded in any other profession, she would have been lauded as a role model of social mobility and overcoming the odds. But her humble roots do not fit the pomp and ceremony of Westminster politics. She, too, has stepped outside the caricature some people had written for her.

Social media has magnified this instinct, but it did not invent it. Long before Twitter and Facebook, Britain had a habit of putting people in boxes. The internet merely allows millions of us to police the boundaries together.

The irony is that the old institutions of legacy media have lost much of their power. The BBC and newspaper editors are no longer the gatekeepers they once were. Both Carol Vorderman on social media and Gary Lineker with his huge podcast empire now command far larger audiences, completely independent from the institutions that once defined their careers. They no longer need permission to be only one thing.

Perhaps that is what unsettles us.

Barbara Windsor honoured the contract Britain quietly wrote for her and was rewarded with extraordinary affection. Carol Vorderman rewrote hers. Gary Lineker rewrote his. Others will continue to do the same.

The real question is not why they changed. It is why so many of us become uncomfortable when people remind us that human beings are more complicated than the stories we first told ourselves about them.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this piece, you will like this:

Phase One: The Wedding

It was the day of the wedding. My wife and I were in the old Victorian terraced house that had so often been the hub of our extended family’s major events. It was deceptively large, sprawling over three storeys above a cellar that had always given me the creeps.

Many of the women seemed a hair clip away from being ready, and there were men struggling with bowties in the narrow corridors. The rooms were full of women in front of mirrors, giggling and sipping wine as they gossiped.

I didn’t know why my cousin Sarah had chosen to get married in the early evening. I had never really understood why she did many things. It seemed odd, but it had at least meant that I had some of the day not to be surrounded by the fussing aunties and weird uncles. In fact, a late start meant that it might be easy to slip away into the night once the reception was in full swing.

My brother’s son, Aaron, was sitting in a room playing games on his smartphone, looking every bit as enthusiastic about the wedding as we were.

From the kitchen, Sarah was with her old school friends, cackling and obviously deep in conversation about the logistics of the big event.

On the wall outside the kitchen was an almost life-size painting of Sarah. It looked like the sort of picture I might have drawn when I was seven: a flowerpot woman painted in garish colours, with coal-black eyes, lurid lipstick, and a crude yellow mane.

“Interesting mural,” my wife remarked, and then headed into the kitchen to get a cold drink.

I stared at it for a moment, and it suddenly seemed intolerable that nobody had bothered to label it. I opened the cellar door, and on the top step was a jar of paint and a couple of dried-out brushes. I whisked them away, and after prising the tin of paint open with my Swiss Army knife, I gingerly dipped the bristles into the murky terracotta goo.

Quick as a flash, I scrawled SARAH across the top of the picture, the letters cutting straight through her painted hair.

I heard a footstep on the stair, checked I hadn’t been seen, and taking the paint and brushes with me, backed towards the cellar door and closed it tentatively behind me.

When the coast was clear, I came out, and my wife re-emerged from the kitchen.

“Have fun in there?” I asked.

She raised her eyebrows and said, “This is chaos. They’re not sure if two minibuses will be enough, so I said we’d make our own way. Emma said it was because of the heat.”

It was a standard, lazy response, and I’d long since stopped asking her to what extent she really meant it.

With great relief at getting out of the house, we set off down Overton Road to see whether we could catch a bus from the terminus.

Phase Two: Brother Callum

I texted my sister to tell her that we would make our own way there, and we slipped out of the house. We walked down Overton Road towards town, the houses becoming shabbier, smaller, and cheaper each hundred yards.

We passed the mosque that in my childhood had looked colourfully out of place, its gold crescent moon and star in gaudy contrast to the industrial gloom of the rest of the street, and its bright green dome and redbrick minarets looking both beautiful and sinister. Nowadays, the walls had moss on them and the green dome had seen better days. It fit right in. We walked on past a redbrick church that had long since become a second-hand store.

We continued in near silence, and then an Austin Metro pulled up on the opposite side of the road. The woman wound down her window and called to us, “Are you going to Sarah’s wedding? I’ll give you a lift.”

Gaynor used to work with my father and was a family friend of sorts. She was a good-humoured woman, who at least would be bearable to sit with for as long as we had to be there.

She pulled into the forecourt at the disused petrol station to turn round, and we got into the back seat. Gaynor was just about to pull out onto the road when a dark-haired man in his mid-thirties beckoned to us. Gaynor wound down the window, and he opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat.

We had no time to react and before we had even gasped, he turned to us. He had the neat, parted hair and sharp jaw of a modern politician, but his eyes were framed by unnaturally thick, ink-black eyelashes that made his stare look heavy and unblinking.

“Callum,” he said, his voice a smooth, low West of Scotland drawl. He didn’t offer a hand. “Brother Callum. I’m going to the ceremony too, sister,” he added, nodding to my wife. “I’ll direct us.”

“You know, I’m not really used to men entering my car without permission.”

Callum apologised profusely and Gaynor accepted. “I’ll take you this time, but if there’s any funny business, there are CCTV cameras everywhere and two witnesses in the back.”

The man directed us through the town centre and began to engage us in pleasant conversation, and we started to feel more at ease.

The shops had just closed for the evening and the pavements were strewn with fast-food wrappers and the occasional homeless person. Down Chancery Lane we saw the tail-end of a march that would probably disband once they reached the now empty town hall square, where their “It’s Already Started” placards and chants had gathered a couple of hours earlier. My uncle had been going on about something like it for years — always some version of the same speech, always waved off at the dinner table as him being him. Nobody in the family had ever taken the trouble to actually ask what he thought needed saving.

“Scum,” breathed Callum. “Is that what we need, setting an example like that to our kids? We gave them freedom and they took it too far. Am I right?”

We nodded as neutrally as we could, hoping that that would be the end of it.

“Am I right, I said? Yes is the answer.” His tone shifted and the bristles stood up on the back of my neck. I mumbled something about the right to assembly.

Callum snarled, “People like you, you think you’re tolerant. You’ll see. One day you’ll all see.”

My wife challenged him. “We all have different opinions, but nobody, and certainly not a stranger, is going to tell me what I may or may not think.”

Gaynor stopped the car and said, “Out! I knew it was a mistake to let you get in.”

The man opened the door to get out and said, “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s because of the heat.”

And with that he hopped out of the car and we continued our journey without him.

Phase Three: The Colonnades

We cleared the city centre and took the dual carriageway for ten minutes in silence. We turned off the main road and drove up Mount Constance as the Colonnades rose above us.

The tired old Metro started to sputter and Gaynor had to pull on the choke to power the car up to the car park. We rolled through the gate and the car died on the gravel, its doors clicking open with a plastic snip that sounded far too loud in the heavy air.

The Colonnades was a monstrous, sprawling structure, built out of raw red sandstone that looked thick and wet, like slabbed liver. It had been designed to echo classical antiquity, with tall, heavy pillars arching up toward a flat sky, but there was no grace to it. The red stone was brutal, coarse-grained, and deeply oppressive, casting long, rust-coloured shadows over a vast concrete courtyard. It felt less like a monument to history and more like an abandoned municipal plaza, or a primary school courtyard scaled up to terrifying proportions.

The air beneath the stone arches was thick and perfectly still, smelling faintly of damp dust. And there, beneath the red pillars, the guests started to assemble.

There was no mingling, no clinking of glasses, no soft murmur of wedding small talk. We were ushered into lines in military formation by men in suits with red and white sashes hanging over their right shoulders to their left hip.

Dozens of faces that I vaguely recognised from different corners of my life were drawn up into rigid, silent lines interspersed with blank-faced strangers. They all stood shoulder-to-shoulder in straight, military rows, staring directly ahead into empty space. There was a buzz of anticipation, although I didn’t notice anybody’s mouths moving in conversation. It looked exactly like an Easter assembly, where hundreds of children are forced to stand in the freezing hall, waiting for permission to sit.

There was a supreme order to the chaotic scene. Murmurs thrummed through the ranks. Nobody seemed to know what we were actually waiting for, yet no one dared to step out of the lines.

Someone shoved my wife and me toward the front of one of the rows. We stood there, exposed, our breath shallow.

Suddenly, a large man broke away from a nearby archway. It was Brother Callum. He had traded his coat for a sharp, high-buttoned black jacket, looking less like a traveller and more like an administrator. He didn’t walk around the formations; he cut straight through them, marching directly toward me. His face showed no recognition; it was a mask of absolute, sheer indifference. Before I could move, he brushed hard against my shoulder, coming close enough for me to smell the stale wool of his suit, and stood squarely on my foot.

He didn’t look down. He didn’t blink. He simply kept walking, stepping off my foot and moving right through the middle of the lines without a single word of acknowledgment. I realised that to him I was as sentient as one of the sandstone columns.

A hot, sharp surge of anger hit me. I turned to my wife, my voice cracking slightly in the echoing stillness of the courtyard.

“Did you see what he just did?” I demanded, physically mimicking his aggressive, heavy-shouldered stride to show her. “He walked right into me! He stood right on my foot!”

My words bounced off the red sandstone pillars. No one moved. No one turned their head. But I knew he had heard me; a heavy, suffocating discomfort settled over the courtyard, as if I had broken a sacred, silent rule.

Before the tension could snap, a man’s voice cut through the heavy air from somewhere near the back.

“Thank you for your patience. Due to some logistical difficulties, the ceremony will now take place elsewhere. It’s because of the heat. You will be transported shortly,” he announced, his voice flat and completely devoid of invitation.

My wife caught my eye and she raised her brow.

“It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

She nodded grimly.

Instantly, the rigid lines began to turn, their feet shuffling in unison on the concrete, ready to march us out from beneath the red stone and down toward the bridge.

Phase Four: The Bridge

The lines moved without instruction. Feet found the same rhythm as if we had all rehearsed it years ago and simply forgotten until now. We were guided away from the Colonnades down a gravel path, the red sandstone shrinking behind us until it became little more than a rust-coloured stain against the evening sky.

Nobody spoke. My wife’s hand found mine and gripped so tightly it hurt. I welcomed the pain. It was the only sensation that still seemed entirely my own.

The smell reached us before the bridge. Not quite sewage, not quite blood, it was something metallic and damp that coated the back of my throat until I could taste it.

The bridge itself looked unfinished. It offered just enough concrete for a single vehicle, with rough edges still waiting for railings that had never arrived. Beneath it was an industrial cutting disappearing into darkness.

At the front, a man wearing the familiar red-and-white sash stopped.

“Look down.”

We did.

The ditch was full. A dark, glistening mound filled the cutting from bank to bank, steaming very slightly in the cooling evening air. It was an abattoir’s discard pile grown to the size of a house, a heap of offal, entrails, the soft ruined insides of many somethings, left to fester. It did not smell like death exactly. It smelled of heat and iron and something underneath that I didn’t have a word for.

Someone behind me coughed. Someone else quietly retched. Nobody stepped back. Some people instinctively covered their noses with handkerchiefs.

“It’s because of the heat,” the man at the front said, to nobody, to everybody. He gestured at the mound as though this explained it, as though this was simply what heat did if you let it.

Two more men in sashes appeared from the far bank carrying shovels. They handed them out along the bridge like hymn books. There were no questions and no answers. When mine came, I found myself accepting it automatically. Only afterwards did I wonder why.

That was when I saw Aaron.

He stood ankle-deep in the mound, wearing the same white shirt he’d left the house in that afternoon. The sleeves were dark to the elbows. His shovel seemed too big for his hands. The shovel entered the mound, lifting, turning, emptying, and then again and again.

“Aaron.”

He didn’t look up at the bridge. He didn’t look like a boy who expected to be rescued. He simply drove the shovel in, lifted, turned, and threw, the motion already worn smooth with repetition, as though he’d been doing it for hours, as though fourteen was simply the age you were made to start.

“Aaron,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to. “Aaron, what are you...”

“Keep moving,” said the man with the sash, not unkindly, the way you’d say it to someone blocking a supermarket aisle. “He’s got his shift. You’ve got yours.”

The shovel in my hands was heavier than it looked, the handle warm, as though someone had been gripping it moments before. My wife had one too, and I watched her stare at it the way you stare at something in a dream that you know is wrong but cannot name why.

“I’m not...” my wife started, and then stopped with a jolt. She knew.

Around us, people had already begun climbing down. There was an elderly couple, a ten-year-old girl with pigtails. A man adjusted his cufflinks and jumped down. Nobody questioned it. They simply accepted their shovels and descended, one by one.

“It’s because of the heat,” said the supervisor again, and this time there was an edge under the flatness, something that had teeth in it, something that made the hairs lift along my arms. “Everybody shovels in the heat. That’s how it’s always been. You wouldn’t want to be the one holding things up, not with everyone watching, not with your family down there already.”

I looked down. My wife was already in the ditch. I hadn’t seen her climb down. Aaron was six feet from her, not looking up at her, shovelling.

I don’t remember climbing down either.

I remember the give of the mound under my shoes, softer than ground should be, warm in a way the evening air wasn’t. I remember the shovel going in easily. It was too easy, there was no resistance at all, as if the mound was pleading to be moved, and the weight of what came up on the plate of the shovel was heavier than it should have been, slick, catching the last of the light with a wet gleam. The arc of my arm heaved it up toward the chute at the top of the bank, where it vanished into a black mouth of corrugated iron with a sound like a held breath being released.

Blood found my forearms. It found the collar of my shirt, the one I’d ironed that morning too, standing in front of the mirror thinking about which shoes to wear. It was warm and then it was cooling, tightening on my skin, and I understood dimly that this had happened to everyone on the bridge, that we had all, at some point without noticing the moment it happened, stopped being wedding guests and become dark labour as we shovelled and discarded matter. We moved mechanically in a rhythm none of us had agreed to but none of us seemed able to break.

“Keep going,” the supervisor called from the bank, not urgently, almost gently, the way you’d encourage a child at a task. He tightened the grip on the lead that kept his frothing-mouthed Dobermann by his side. “Nearly there. This needs to get done quickly because of the heat.”

Every now and again, one of them would stop a shoveller and allow the dog to lick the plate of the spade.

That was when the mound moved.

Not from where we dug. Further along, near the centre, where nobody’s shovel had touched. A slow ripple went through the surface of it, the way a ripple goes through the surface of water when something large turns beneath it, except this was not water, this had never been water, and the ripple did not fade. It gathered. Three points along the mound began to bulge and shine, the dark red-black surface stretching thin and taut and wet, like something pressing up from underneath trying to find the air.

A shiver ran down my spine. The supervisor’s tone didn’t change at all when he said, almost bored, “Keep at it. Nearly finished.”

The three shining points split.

They parted, cleanly, the way a seam gives when it was always sewn to give. Three ragged vertical mouths opened in the mound with a sound like a held breath and a wet, sucking gasp, and from each one something began to rise.

Beside me, my wife made a small sound, not quite a scream, cut off before it could become one, because none of us, not one person on that bridge or in that ditch, had stopped moving. My arm was already primed for the next load. The shovel was already sinking in.

The supervisor looked further down the seemingly endless line and spoke five words. Another voice picked up the mantra, and then another, until the whole ditch was murmuring it under the wet, rhythmic sound of shovels:

“It’s because of the heat. It’s because of the heat. It’s because of the heat.”

Meanwhile, the three thin shapes finished rising out of the mound and stood, swaying very slightly, facing the bridge, waiting.

Phase Five: The Campus

The transition from the wet, iron-heavy dark of the ditch to the dry, dead-eyed quiet of the school grounds had no clean boundary. One moment we were in the grease of it, and the next we were being ushered up the steep embankment by the supervisors and their dogs, our boots dragging, heavy with the red-black silt.

The blood couldn’t be dried off. It was already drying, tightening across my forearms and the collar of my shirt like a second, stiff skin. It smelled of copper coins left too long in a sweating palm, one sniff away from heaving.

We were guided through a gap in a towering chain-link fence. The campus inside did not look like a place for a reception. It was a sprawling, silent network of single-story brick outhouses, asphalt yards, and narrow alleyways, all choked behind high mesh. In the failing light, the buildings looked abandoned, but they felt occupied, as if hundreds of people were standing just behind the dark, wire-reinforced windows, watching us silently.

“This way,” a woman’s voice called from ahead. She didn’t look back to see if we were following. She knew we were.

We discovered that the ground-level paths were entirely blocked off by high mesh fencing. The only way to reach the main building was to climb up and walk across a series of low, interconnected tarpaulin roofs. These were temporary, sagging plastic sheets stretched over the timber frames of the school’s outdoor walkways. They looked like frozen blue waves, bridging the gaps between the brick outhouses.

“I can’t,” my wife whispered, her hand trembling against mine. Her good wedding shoes were ruined, the heels caked in dried offal, slick and treacherous. “Mark, I’ll slip. We’ll go through.”

“Keep moving,” a voice from behind us muttered. It wasn’t an order; it was just a statement of fact, flat and heavy. We didn’t turn to look at the speaker.

We climbed onto the blue plastic. With every step, the tarpaulin let out a loud, hollow thrum-thrum that echoed in the empty spaces beneath our feet. Through the seams in the plastic, I could see down into the dark courtyards below: deserted playgrounds, rusty climbing frames, and empty benches, all waiting in the dusk. The air was thin, and it was suffocatingly warm. The heat didn’t rise from the earth or shine from the sun; it seemed to press down from the grey sky like a damp wool blanket.

At the far end of the roofs, where the tarpaulin met the concrete steps of the main building, four children were waiting.

They were about twelve or thirteen, dressed in grey school uniforms that looked slightly too large for them. They had a ball, a heavy, scuffed leather football, and they were kicking it between themselves with a casual, practiced cruelty. They didn’t look like children at play. They had the hard, knowing faces of schoolyard bullies who have never been told no.

As we stepped off the plastic, one of them kicked the ball hard, directly at my shins. It didn’t hurt me, but it forced me to halt.

“Hey mister,” the tallest boy said, his voice gratingly loud in the quiet yard. “Give us our ball back.”

They stood in a loose semi-circle, blocking the double doors to the hall. I felt a sudden, exhausting surge of irritation. After the ditch, after the blood, this petty, mundane irritation felt like a physical weight. I wanted to be clean. I wanted to get past them.

I swung my leg in anger and tried to hoof the ball back over the high mesh fence to be rid of them. My foot clipped the leather awkwardly, and the ball scuffed along the concrete, stopping only a few feet away. I waited for their mockery.

But the boys didn’t laugh. They just watched me, their faces completely blank, waiting.

I took two steps, aimed more carefully, and kicked it again. This time, my foot slipped on the dried grease of my sole, and the ball merely bounced weakly against the bottom of the fence and rolled back to my feet. My knee didn’t want to bend; the dried crust of blood on my trousers had stiffened, but beneath it, my actual joints felt dry and flat, as if my bones were losing their roundness and hardening into cardboard.

The tallest boy slowly shook his head. He didn’t look angry; he looked disappointed, the way a teacher looks at a slow child.

“It’s because of the heat,” he said, turning his back on us as if we no longer existed.

The double doors of the assembly hall swung open.

The smell hit us first: floor polish, damp gym mats, and the stale, sweet scent of cheap catering tea. Inside, the hall was decorated for a party, but it was a pathetic, half-hearted effort. Loops of faded crepe paper hung from the high rafters, and tinsel was taped to the brick walls. Rows of wooden benches faced a raised wooden stage at the far end.

The guests from the Colonnades were already there, seated in silent rows. I had always hoped that it wouldn’t happen this way. But as I glanced at the other guests, they were changing.

As we walked down the central aisle, I looked at the faces of the people I knew. Their features were losing their depth. The shadows around their eyes and noses were flattening out, their skin taking on the texture of thick paper. They looked less like living people and more like the five-foot murals from the terraced house, crude, simple, painted with a terrifying, unearned confidence by someone who had no idea how a human face was actually put together.

Near the front sat my cousin Sarah and two other brides in white. She was perfectly still. Her face was a flat, two-dimensional caricature of herself, her eyes just two simple, dark circles drawn on a white background. Across her chest, the name Sarah was faintly visible, written in tiny, terracotta-coloured letters that looked like dried mud.

At the podium on the stage stood Brother Callum. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, his dark eyelashes looked like thick, painted lines, just like the ink-slashes on the face of the mural. He looked entirely in his element, presiding over an event he had been planning for a long time. The microphone in front of him crackled with static.

“We are gathered here today to enter a new era, brothers and sisters,” his voice boomed through the cheap speakers, echoing off the wooden rafters. “A clean break. A new start. We will be masters and mistresses of our own destiny. We reject the institutions of the past and from this day forth will create our own eternal unions.”

Behind him, three shadows stretched out from the wings of the stage.

They glided forward into the fluorescent light of the hall. They were the tall, thin, jointless shapes from the offal mound. Up close, they looked like their skin was a wet, grey-brown membrane that seemed to slide over itself, and their long, spindly limbs moved with a sickening, liquid grace. Their faces, or what should have been their faces, were devoid of features apart from vertical slits in the middle. They wore the tatters of red wedding sashes across their chests, just stopping short of their tails.

They did not attack. They did not make a sound. They simply stood behind the front row of empty chairs, waiting.

“And now, for the main ceremony,” Brother Callum said, gesturing toward the front row.

A supervisor with a Dobermann guided us toward the two empty seats directly beneath the stage. My wife’s hand was cold as ice in mine, but her legs moved mechanically, finding the same rhythm as the marchers from the Colonnades. The firm, defiant woman who had stood by Gaynor in the car was gone, replaced by a quiet, paper-thin compliance that let her hand go completely limp, offering no more resistance than a discarded wedding invitation. We couldn’t stop. Our bodies knew the way.

The air in the hall grew thick, heavy, and stiflingly warm, like the inside of a greenhouse. It caught in the back of my throat, tasting of iron and dust.

As I reached my chair, a hand, long, hairless, and freezing cold, dropped onto my shoulder from behind. The weight of it was immense, pressing me down into the wooden seat.

From the rows behind us, a soft, rhythmic whisper began to rise from the paper-flat guests, a dry, rustling sound that filled the corners of the room. It crackled with a brittle, hungry sound, each sharp pop marking another corner of the leaf disappearing into ash like the pages of a banned book.

The stifling air finally crossed a threshold, turning from merely hot to scorched, and the edges of the guests’ paper-flat shoulders began to brown, curling inward with a dry, static hiss as the heat began to eat them from the outside in.

“Because of the heat,” said Brother Callum from his podium, his dark, heavy-lashed eyes reflecting the first sparks of the dry, shifting paper as he turned to the three newly-wed couples.

“Because of the heat,” they echoed.

This Substack is reader-supported. If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

When you encounter someone with “Professor” before their name, you’d be forgiven for imagining someone rather snooty: rigid, aloof, and speaking with the sort of accent that suggests they learnt Latin before they learnt to laugh. Carl Chinn cheerfully demolishes every one of those assumptions. He is living proof that academic rigour and working-class identity don’t have to be mutually exclusive—even if Britain’s university establishment has sometimes treated the Chinns of this world as though they were bacon butties at a Bar Mitzvah.

I first encountered the effervescent enigma that is Professor Chinn—or, as he really ought to be known, just Carl—on Blindboy Boatclub’s podcast. Blindboy, the Irish writer and podcaster with the plastic bag permanently covering his face, has an extraordinary knack for finding fascinating guests. Carl immediately stood out.

He has a high-pitched but wonderfully warm voice that positively radiates working-class authenticity. Years ago, when I drove delivery vans around the Midlands, I met dozens of forklift drivers and warehouse foremen who sounded just like him. Nothing about Carl suggested the detached academic. Everything suggested the bloke you’d happily have a pint with after work.

Birmingham has always suffered from an image problem. It is Britain’s second largest city, yet somehow remains the butt of jokes from people who know little about it beyond traffic jams and the notorious Spaghetti Junction. For millions of motorists, Birmingham is simply the place where the M6 motorway grinds to a halt amid factories, flyovers, and frustrated lorry drivers. Its accent, unfairly maligned for decades, has become shorthand for dullness despite belonging to one of Britain’s warmest and funniest regions.

As a young delivery driver, I spent countless hours navigating the West Midlands with my battered A–Z city atlas on the passenger seat and BBC Radio WM burbling away with traffic reports. Somewhere between wrong turns and industrial estates, I found myself falling for Birmingham. Many of its loveliest corners were places I discovered by accident while trying to avoid congestion. More than that, I came to admire the city’s people. They possessed an earthy humour, generosity, and lack of pretension that they have never felt the need to market to the rest of the country.

Carl Chinn is not simply from Birmingham; he is woven into its fabric. Forget academic gowns and clipped Received Pronunciation. Carl is loud, gregarious, broad-vowelled, and utterly impossible to pigeonhole. He has the energy of a nineteenth-century street preacher crossed with a market trader who somehow also happens to hold a professorship. That contradiction is precisely what makes him so compelling.

The Pedigree

Most historians read about illegal street betting, back-to-back housing, and Victorian urban poverty in university archives. But Carl’s grandfathers were illegal bookmakers and manual labourers, and his great-grandfather was a real-life Peaky Blinder—something he takes no pride from but doesn’t shy away from, and has indeed written four books that demystify the brutal gangsters who dominated his city.

At the age of sixteen, Carl was running a bookmaker’s shop for his father and continued to do so as he balanced school and university with running a business that was the hub of a community surrounded by factories, warehouses, and tough working-class men. He grew up in a tight-knit urban community where, from childhood, he was enthralled by stories from the kitchen table and from the bookies. Before Carl had even heard of degrees and doctorates, he encountered storytellers and tales of bombsites, back-to-back houses, pubs, neighbours, and how people beat the system to survive.

It was this—the real history of ordinary people, who didn’t have streets named after them but instead lived in them. By the time he arrived at university, he already possessed something many historians spend their careers searching for: an instinct for the lives of ordinary people.

Subscribe now

Now in his late sixties, Carl gained a PhD in 1986 while still running the bookies. By the mid-1980s, Britain’s industrial landscape was changing rapidly. Factories were closing, communities were shrinking, and the betting trade that had supported Carl’s family for years was beginning to struggle, just like the working classes that had sustained it. Armed with a freshly minted doctorate, he suddenly found himself unemployed.

Not having the accent, the connections, or the knowledge of how to break into academia, he signed on the dole and, in order to maintain his welfare payments, was encouraged to undergo ‘retraining’. The idea of a man who had run a business since his mid-teens and held a doctorate needing retraining was preposterous, but along the way, the advisor at the jobcentre helped him exploit a loophole in Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance programme. Following in the footsteps of many a busker, he set up as the country’s first and only ‘freelance historian’, where he could get a stipend, earn as he wished, and if he made no money, still claim his unemployment benefit.

Universities had never quite known what to do with Carl Chinn. Birmingham, on the other hand, knew exactly what to do with him. It invited him into its schools, libraries, pubs, community centres, newspapers, and radio stations. He became less a professor who occasionally spoke to ordinary people than an ordinary Brummie who happened to become a professor. Carl was sharing social history with the masses, and the people loved him for it.

Demythologising vs. Dignifying

What makes Carl so compelling is that he spends such refreshingly little time on the elites who shape the conventional history of a country. While many of his peers were glorifying the British Empire and all those pink bits on the map, Carl focuses more on the Chartists—a 19th-century political movement that laid the foundations of universal suffrage and created the first proud working-class identity.

The success of Peaky Blinders gave Birmingham a mythology. Never as globally well known as Manchester, Liverpool, or other industrial cities, Birmingham perhaps deserves the recognition that the gangster TV hit has given it. Yet Carl Chinn has spent years trying to gently dismantle the mythology behind it. Having had a great-grandfather whom he freely labels “an evil man” among the real gang members, he understands better than most that organised crime was rarely glamorous. His books stick pins in the pop-culture balloon, replacing the television romance to restore the violence, poverty, and fear that fiction understandably softens.

Carl changes the heroes of the story and bestows real dignity on marginalised communities—so often ignored or patronised by the middle class and wealthy who saw them as units of labour rather than the fabric of society. Their actual oral histories, dialect, and daily struggles are explored meticulously, lending an authentic weight that the academic world and political classes largely ignore.

The Rare Gift

There is much to admire about Carl Chinn, but while we can admire Richard Branson or King Charles, with Carl it goes beyond that. We simply like him. We feel his warmth and empathy, and I am delighted that now, as a senior citizen, his unique brand of storytelling and kindness is finally reaching a wider audience.

On his podcast Our Lives, Our Stories, he interviews people from his hometown who have played a part in shaping the modern city just as much as the working-class folk of Sparkbrook shaped the past. Whether it’s broadcaster Adrian Goldberg relating his father’s escape from Nazi Germany or Roifield Brown talking about his Caribbean parents as part of the Windrush generation and weeping for his sick father, Carl joyfully and warmly accepts anybody who wants to be a Brummie.

The podcast is the perfect format for him. When he presented on BBC WM, he was called into the office and reprimanded for calling older female callers “wenches”. Now, people outside of the region may not realise that this is a local term of endearment, somewhere between “nan” and “lovey”. Carl’s bosses at the BBC didn’t understand that, and he agreed to stop using the term. On his very next show, an older lady was the first caller, gushingly telling him, “I love it when you call us old girls wenches. It takes me back to the warmth of my grandparents.”

Subscribe now

On a podcast, he is under no such restraints. A typical episode sees him with what appears to be eight or nine pre-prepared questions, and then he simply lets the guest speak. He ad-libs with questions, sympathetic noises, or snippets of knowledge, but the show is always about the guest and never about him.

Our Lives Our Stories Podcast - interview with Robin Campbell of UB40

He is so different from other public intellectuals. Even if Stephen Fry is unfailingly and painstakingly gracious, he is still on the show for his own ego or paycheque. Carl doesn’t do that: he does curiosity without condescension and has the wonderful ability to code-switch, making him socially bilingual—he knows when to use highbrow language and when it is right to warmly say to a Brummie woman, “You’re a soft old wench, aren’t you?” That is an intelligence beyond letters and academia.

Why Britain Needs More Carl Chinns

Britain instinctively distrusts intelligence and experts. Part of this is the fault of the universities, which have become remarkably good at producing experts but rather less good at shaping public intellectuals from humble backgrounds. We can argue about the politics and sociology behind this all we like, but universities are full of jargon, egos, and well-off students. Somewhere along the way, they have completely filtered out the very people they sought to represent thirty years ago.

Regional accents are less pronounced than they used to be, with the exception of a few urban anomalies like Liverpool, where accent and identity have strengthened in recent years. Ultimately, the media, education, and politics desperately need public figures who refuse to flatten their accents or apologise for their working-class roots in order to be taken seriously in public life.

Carl has made a career out of being from Birmingham, championing its cause and welcoming people of all creeds and colours under the Brummie banner. He never weaponised his PhD to make himself the big cheese. Whether he’s talking to a university panel, an elderly wench in a care home, or an Irish podcaster in a plastic bag, his warmth and listening capacity remain completely authentic. He brings people together because he genuinely believes every ordinary life contains an extraordinary story.

Unimpressed by academic infighting and social divisions, Carl Chinn’s great strength is that he never stopped being a Brummie you’d like to go for a pint with—and somewhere along the way, he became one of Britain’s best and most authentic historians as well.

If you enjoyed this, I recommend the following:

This Substack is reader-supported. If you find value in what you read here, you can subscribe or contribute to keep the work going.

Please click the purple link below.

If you can’t afford to do that, please subscribe for free and restack.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

27th October 2025

There’s a lady who knows all that glitters is not gold—and she believes the end is nigh. I know a woman who’s convinced the Rapture is imminent. With a sharp tongue, some missing teeth, and a mean right hook, she has become certain that the faithful will soon rise skyward while the rest of us—apostates, Labour voters, Muslims, asylum seekers and gays—will all be left to burn.

And as she marches into battle against Lucifer’s liberal legions, she wields a mighty two-sided conviction: one edge is the sharp, uncharitable sword of her theology, the other is padded with surprising warmth and personal generosity. We share a mutual understanding that I will not be raptured, yet she is determined to make my subsequent struggle with fire and brimstone as materially comfortable as possible. She’s selflessly offered me her extensive collection of power tools and given me detailed instructions on how to operate the Renault Clio’s tricky gearbox, which will be part of my inheritance once she has ascended to heaven. The handover has been smooth, organised and efficient: I know where her mother’s jewels are hidden and how to feed the cats, should I inherit it all after Christ’s triumphant return.

While my interest in faith and comparative religion is lifelong, my geography of the outer fringes of the Christian religion is admittedly scant. Until recently, I’d never heard of the Rapture or the subsequent Tribulation. Apparently, YouTube luminaries had been predicting that Christ was due back in autumn 2025 (or should that date fail to materialise, watch this space) to whisk the true believers up to heaven, leaving the rest of us heathens to fight Satan on Earth. I found the story faintly ridiculous but said nothing. One must tread gently around apocalypse enthusiasts—especially those promising to donate spare tools.

Two months later, to repay the kindness, we invited the couple to dinner. The husband—quieter, more thoughtful, the sort who looks like he has spent a lifetime indulging domestic eccentricity—asked if we could say grace. My wife, delighted to relive a childhood ritual, agreed. It couldn’t hurt, could it?

We worked our way through Balinese pork belly and vegetable stir-fry, washed down with alarming quantities of champagne. The conversation was friendly and superficial, maintained by my performative yet deflective bonhomie. I adopted the method of the pub pacifist: essentially gameshow-host nice—agree with everything and, when you must oppose, do it with a charming wry comment and whatever you do, try not to let the conversation steer itself to death, inheritance and the end of days. It’s a wonderful way to both protect yourself and simultaneously have a certain kind of lunatic eat out of your hand.

But as the evening wore on and the bubbles worked their alchemy, the talk turned from how dirty our windows were to religion. I have no issue with religion and envy the certainty of those with faith; I even enjoy discussing it when people actually think. I was ready for an intellectual indulgence, perhaps a debate on whether there had ever been a lost animistic “pan-religion” linking the ancient wisdom of the Druids, Shamans, and Buddha—simple but too complex for our species to ever grasp more than the vaguest understanding of, and how cultures across the globe had filled in the gaps, turning a lost lyric into a liturgy. In short, I intrinsically can’t see how, for the first 98,000 years on this planet, nobody was allowed into heaven before Jesus arrived just 2000 years ago.

I should have nodded benignly, kept my thoughts to myself—instead, I heard myself suggest that no one could actually prove whether God exists or not, so trying to convert the unwilling to religion or atheism is futile. My neighbour disagreed. God had been proven, she insisted, because archaeologists (though she actually said “architects”) had found the walls of Jericho. Her triumph at this ‘evidence’ did nothing but confirm the existence of stonemasonry, but she was on a roll. At that point, a small part of me died.

The next nugget of information that I gleaned was that in the “Muslim Book of Revelation”—a document that exists only in her imagination—Jesus is referred to as the Antichrist. When I gently corrected her, noting that Jesus is revered in the Qur’an, she replied cheerfully, “Oh well, I’ve not read it. Is there any of that champagne left?”

The next morning, I was awake early, frantically Googling all the hitherto unknown fun facts and conspiracy theories that I’d been subject to the night before. Not because I doubted my sanity—but because I needed to understand hers.

There’s something almost touching about her readiness to let go, as if she’s already packed for eternity. Yet it’s not salvation she’s preparing for—it’s an apocalypse shaped by multi-millionaire mega-church preachers in America and Facebook memes. Her faith is no longer about love or mercy. It’s about who deserves to be saved. And let me tell you: the saved will all be white, heterosexual, climate-change deniers, either wealthy or—like my friends—the loyal trickle-down neo-serfs.

This woman is British, a pure Cockney fishwife, but her theology and worldview are unmistakably American. Her Jesus is less the wandering pacifist of Galilee and more a flag-draped sheriff guarding the border from Mexicans queuing up to rape Aryan virgins. When she speaks of righteousness, it comes wrapped in warnings about migrants, drag queens, and vaccines. Her worldview is a late import from the Bible Belt: a gospel of fear, packaged in the stars and stripes and sold at a discount on YouTube.

How did we come to this? Once, Christianity was the Sermon on the Mount—“Blessed are the meek… blessed are the peacemakers.” Today, many of its loudest defenders preach an inverse gospel: blessed are the armed, the angry, the unrepentant. Compassion is weakness; humility, treason.

In America, this contradictory creed began its transformation during the Cold War, when religion became a weapon in the ideological arsenal against communism. “Godless socialism” was the ultimate sin, and Christ became the patron saint of capitalism. Patriotism and piety merged, producing that potent blend of sentimentality and self-righteousness now exported across the Atlantic.

My neighbour’s faith is a microcosm of this shift. In fairness, she’s had little to cheer about: an abusive childhood, addiction, family collapse, no education, and a crushing loneliness that cries out for belonging. Her faith gives her certainty, but it’s a cruel certainty—a fortress mentality where moral worth is measured by exclusion. Talk politics, and it mutates instantly: one moment it’s small boats, the next it’s “Michelle Obama is a man. His real name is Michael.” Her Christianity isn’t theological; it’s tribal. It answers the ache of belonging with the promise of divine superiority.

And yet, I can’t hate her. The keys will be returned, but my anger is tempered by pity. She’s not evil; she’s terrified. She’s been told, again and again, that her country, her culture, her very self are under siege. The apocalypse gives that fear meaning. If the world must burn, at least someone’s in charge of the fire.

What saddens me most is that Christianity once offered the opposite of this: a radical invitation to empathy, enlightenment and grace. Its founder walked among lepers, prostitutes, and foreigners—the very people this modern movement despises. The Sermon on the Mount remains one of the most revolutionary manifestos ever spoken. That it now serves as a footnote to the politics of border walls, billionaires and bigotry is not only one of the great ironies of our time, but also one of the great tragedies of man.

I no longer see this woman as a friend-in-the-making, but as a symptom of something deeper: a faith hollowed out and refilled with ideology. She isn’t preparing for the Rapture; she’s living in it already—a moral catastrophe disguised as certainty, a heaven built on the ruins of reason.

And it’s built on hate, not love.

Subscribe now

Postscript, June 2026: Autumn 2025 has, of course, come and gone. The sky did not open, the righteous remain firmly among us, and I am safely—if disappointingly—still required to purchase my own power tools.

This Substack is reader-supported. That means there’s no paywall-heavy publishing machine behind it, no advertising department. Just writing, and the time it takes to do it properly.

If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

HIGH ON THE HILL sat the grand chamber of the Valley Syndicate. The building served a dual purpose: by day, it was the boardroom where the directors counted their dividends; by night, it was the town hall, where those exact same directors sat as the ruling council.

They owned the mines, the mills, and the law itself. Yet, the townsfolk below, who worked longer hours for fewer coins while the price of coal rose every winter, still held the right to vote for the town’s charter every four years. And election day was looming.

The directors looked over the ledger, facing a frustrating dilemma. “We want to pass an amendment to the charter that ensures all profits flow strictly up to this hill and strips the workers of their remaining leverage,” the First Director said. “But we have a problem: even with our money, there are only a dozen of us, and the workers outnumber us a thousand to one. If they unite, they’ll vote us off our own council.”

The Second Director leaned back, chewing his cigar. “How do we convince the hungry to cast a ballot that cements the theft of their own bread?”

After a long silence, the Third Director tapped the mahogany table. “We must give them a different enemy. We will tell them that the reason their wages are flat and the coal is expensive, is not because of our council seats or our dividends. We will tell them it’s because of the migrant labourers living in the shanties by the rail lines.”

“Brilliant,” the First Director cheered. “We will hand out syndicate-branded flags, tell them they are the true sons of the valley, and point them toward the tracks. The men will grab their iron bars and rampage in a fury.”

“But what if they break our town laws while rampaging?” asked a junior executive.

“Oh, as the council, we will issue an official decree championing their ‘sacred right to free speech and assembly,’” whispered the Third Director with a smirk. “We won’t actually bail them out when our constables lock them up, of course. But they will believe we are on their side, and they will march straight to the ballot box to vote ‘Yes’ on our new charter.”

The junior executive hesitated. “But once the charter is passed and our council seats are locked in forever, won’t they eventually look up at the hill, see we’ve grown richer, and realise they’ve been used?”

The directors laughed, the sound echoing off the wood-panelled walls.

“My dear boy,” the First Director chuckled, “by the time they realise that, we will have used our new council powers to rewrite the charter entirely. They’ll be so busy waving their flags that they won’t even notice their right to speak has been struck from the books.

This Substack is reader-supported. That means there’s no paywall-heavy publishing machine behind it, no advertising department. Just writing, and the time it takes to do it properly.

If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The man sat at the kitchen table by the black iron cooking range. The range heated the room and the air was thick with the smell of burning dead wood, grease, carbolic soap and stale cigarette smoke. The room was built around necessity, with nothing decorative that wasn’t useful. Cast iron skillets and pots. Tin jugs. A meat hammer by a cleaver.

He kept the beat of the ticking clock with his stick. Outside, the rain and the howling wind pounded the panes and the window frames shook and the latches tınkled agaınst the wood lıke fallıng keys. The dog stared at him pleadingly, but it was no use. He couldn’t see the dog, nor could he see that the sky-blue paint on the pantry door needed another coat.

The dog was on the same level as his brown boots. Meticulously polished, the leather dominated his scent glands. His soles were thick leather, studded with metal hobnails. Every creature in the house could hear the clacking of his nailed boots and white stick as he moved around the cramped kitchen’s uneven flagstones. His movement resembled a heavy, one-legged sailor lurching across a slick dock.

The boots were ankle-high with a reinforced square toe. The man didn’t know how long he’d owned the boots but they had been resoled and repaired repeatedly over the years by the cobbler at the end of the street. The leather lacked sheen but the waxy look of the dubbin showed that these boots had been given a lot of attention and were as much a part of him as his empty heart.

He could hear from the chimes of the clock and the pained pants that the dog wouldn’t work again. The dog wheezed and gazed at the man who couldn’t see imploringly. The man rose to his feet, steadied himself on the table, drew back his hefty right boot The dog yelped as its ribs broke. Its breathing became a wet, rhythmic wheeze. He took his stick, shoved it down the dog’s collar and twisted. The dog breathed no more.

The clock ticking and the driving rain were the only sounds until the click of the matchstick and the burning phosphorus. He exhaled thick grey clouds and cursed the useless dog. Harry could bury it when he got home.

He couldn’t survive without a dog. He could navigate the house, but outside of his stone walls was different. He sat in silence, smoking. His granddaughter would be home from school soon. The junior school finished at 4 pm.

He heard a key scrape in the door. Ethel didn’t realise she had just completed her last ever day of school.

She took off her wet coat to hang by the range and let out a blood-curdling scream as she saw the dog lying on the floor motionless.

“Get me some soup!” he snarled.

As she scurried to obey, a sly grin spread across his face. Perhaps the problem of the dead dog wouldn’t be a problem after all.

If you enjoyed this story, here are some other short stories you might enjoy:

This Substack is reader-supported. If you’ve read so far, please support me clicking the purple button below to help my writing going. If you can’t afford that, please subscribe, comment or restack.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

It takes some people decades to realise they were deeply unhappy in their youth. I am one of them. For twenty-five years, I remembered my university days in Liverpool as a chaotic blur of noise and antics. It took a random Facebook message on a spring afternoon from an old friend, Lauren, to show me that while I was busy playing the rowdy fool, I was actually running from myself.

Memories can be very hazy, but fragments started to come back to me. I remembered her Doc Martens and weird aversion to barcodes and bus tickets. I remembered that she loved strong Scrumpy cider but didn’t handle it well. But I remembered that she was the second person I met at university and that most of all, she was really nice.

In about our third text exchange she told me that she still laughed at the time I knocked on her door with Cliff, a friend I shared a house with for over half of my student days who now happens to be her brother-in-law. When she opened the door, we pelted her and the room with flour and eggs and ran away giggling, leaving a trail of pancake mix in our wake. I was mortified. My thought process went something like this:

Surely I wouldn’t do that.

Did I do that? Really?

Maybe I did do that.

I did do that.

I still don’t remember it, but I did lots of things like that back then with Cliff.

She took me on a journey of remembrance. She recalled things I had barely remembered two days after they had happened. We talked about mutual friends. She mentioned Cliff and another friend, Nige, and it occurred to me that she had still maintained many relationships from those days, while I had largely turned my back or escaped, as I have a tendency to do.

She gave me Cliff’s details and we quickly struck up a thread. We were almost a double act: a Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson tribute act, and yet sadly among the murky amnesia of memory, we stopped seeing each other. More specifically—we were stopped from seeing each other by the girl he had just moved in with.

And that was it: The Bovver Bruvvers went our own two ways, I assumed forever. I never did understand what I’d done wrong—this year I have discovered that he didn’t either.

We shared so much more than doing a runner from an Indian restaurant; buying pheromone spray from an adult emporium, daring each other to ask for it; or decorating our friend’s bedroom with adult literature while he was out on a date.

The simple things that mount up over the years.

It hurt me and served to compound my feelings of shame and self-loathing and the need to pack a bag and leave no forwarding address.

I eventually found Nige and it felt like disparate parts of life’s jigsaw puzzle were suddenly linking together to form a picture. The stories came flooding back: Nige’s Suede-fan friends dyeing their dark hair purple and, when he tried it, it going pink because he was blonde; a night in the Krazy House with him professing his undying love for a girl he was friends with and then throwing up all over the floor.

I had done it. I had remembered being young.

The Two Lost Memories

Returning to the flour and eggs situation, there were probably many incidents of high jinks, but my memory has blocked so many of them out. To my amazement, Lauren still wanted to be friends after that and told me the story had become part of family lore. Interestingly, Cliff didn’t clearly remember the incident nor the sex shop scandal.

Wracked with the familiar shame, I could only apologise. But then she countered with a tale of her first term at university, and how she was so unhappy she considered quitting her course. When she said this, I did have general memories of late-night conversations with her and offering some comfort, but no specifics leapt out at me.

I found this sadder than the pancake incident: that I could have forgotten not only something bad that I did, but also something good.

I realise, though, that she was much more self-aware and ready to face the world than I was. She knew her hang-ups then. She knew her phobia of barcodes and bus tickets was eccentric but real.

She knew when she was unhappy, and she allowed herself to feel it. I, wrapped tightly in my protective layers of defiant, outrageous humour and a permanent, protective sneer, couldn’t even afford to look inside.

It took me the best part of two decades to actually articulate my hang-ups and realise that I was deeply unhappy without even noticing.

The Chivalrous Goat

Within the last 24 hours, I have had several chats with all three old friends. All the chats seem interlinked, but they’re also unique. It is far more than “remember when”, though that is not to discount nostalgia.

During conversations with Nige, he remarked that it looked like I ‘really had my shit together’. He just thought I enjoyed playing the goat and drinking too much.

He talked about when he was at university: as a working-class kid from Ellesmere Port, being in awe of the cool kids who liked all the right things, and I remember him quite quietly switching his musical allegiances from Motörhead to Dinosaur Jr., or some similarly trendy 90s indie/alternative band. He also revealed that he quickly realised that most of these kids he admired turned out to be fakers.

On my wall, taking pride of place was a poster of the evergreen and ultra-uncool rockers Status Quo and Nige reminded me that I also had a poem above my bed called Am I Man?, which I had written in fancy letters and which went something like this:

Am I not a man?

If you cut me and I bleed, am I not a man?

If I cry when I am sad, am I not a man?

If I feel pain when I am hurt, am I not a man?

Am I not a man?

If I have a pair of lactating breasts and a vagina... am I not a man?

Again, I am fascinated that he would remember this detail so vividly 28 years on, while I didn’t – even if it was my joke.

I realised that while he, who was actually a very interesting individual, was experimenting with pink hair, alternative rock and projectile vomiting as some kind of youthful protest, I was protesting against the protestors. Status Quo, silly poems and my rejection of student fashion.

Many students go to university wanting to smash the bourgeois order, but only to end up reinventing it in different clothes. It’s all rather Animal Farm, where the pigs expel the humans and, by the end, have adopted so many human traits that the pigs and humans become indistinguishable. So I chose my own rejection of it all: tracksuit bottoms, sweatshirts and stubborn indifference.

I know now that I was navigating the transition into adulthood entirely from the inside out, using noise and tomfoolery to drown out a cycle of inferiority, drink, arrogance and shame.

Real-Time Emotion vs Delayed Realisation

I was brought up not to bleat about problems. My parents, who were newcomers to the middle-class gig, had that Thatcherite combination of disdain for the snobby elites and for their own more humble roots. One thing that was instilled in me, from early on, was a kind of secular fire and brimstone: they knew the true path, and all other gods were “false prophets”. This left me in a no-man’s land of identity. Without their firm sense of achievement in social mobility, I was left riddled with class angst.

A brief spell in a private international school had seen me interact with sons and daughters of diplomats, drug barons and dancing divas before landing with a bump in Bolton, where my private school accent did me no favours. I tried my best to fit in and adopt the local patois, but through my flirtations with cricket, it was confirmed to me that the private school boys saw me as an oik.

I was bullied for being too high-class and for being too low-class.

To me, it was all nonsense and when I arrived at university and many of the kids were pretending to look homeless while creating exclusive cliques based on degrees of coolness and nonchalance, I wanted nothing to do with it. The tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt became my thing.

I was completely disconnected in terms of identity, yet oddly never short of friends, as these exchanges have proved.

I didn’t understand any of this, of course, but continued to fight on all fronts, sustaining significant collateral damage. Happiness was sitting in front of me, but I just couldn’t access it.

I was a vandal, a drunk, a clown.

I think, though, that I was still decent at the core.

One Friday evening—and I do remember this one—Lauren’s boyfriend had mistreated her. I assembled a few other angry villagers, we collected our pitchforks and dispensed a justice unacceptable to the courts. Nige remembered this too and recently told me that this was actually quite chivalrous.

And maybe it was.

I was perfectly capable of trying to get a friend out of a darkness that I didn’t even realise plagued me.

The Blue Bosphorus vs the Murky Mersey

And now I live by the Bosphorus. I can look back on my life now with a clarity that the Mersey never had.

This summer, after more than a quarter of a century, I’ll sit down with Nige and Cliff again. We won’t do the Smithdown Ten pub crawl, throw batter at friends, or stagger around the sticky-floored Krazy House.

But perhaps that’s the point.

We are not necessarily the best historians of our own lives. The people who knew me best during those chaotic years are still willing to answer the phone.

This Substack is reader-supported. That means there’s no paywall-heavy publishing machine behind it, no advertising department. Just writing, and the time it takes to do it properly.

If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Leave a comment

A couple of years back, I found myself doing an interview on a podcast. I don’t want to name the show, but it was specifically aimed at middle-aged men who had lost their direction. At the time, I was presenting a reasonably popular comedy podcast called Talking Istanbullocks. Our show combined feel-good banter with surreal satirical sketches and, in many ways, was as far removed from a healing-for-the-mature-manosphere podcast as you could get.

And yet, was it really so different? I had set up the podcast because I felt on the scrapheap myself and needed to do something creative, silly, and fun.

In the podcast world, you guest on someone’s show and, if it works, they guest on yours. Anyway, as always with these things, there was the usual email and telephone contact before the recording, and then a brief chat before going on air. It was all very jolly, and we seemed to have a good rapport. Yet, looking at him, I wasn’t quite sure I was the typical guest for the show. Typical guests were nice guys who had hit rock bottom and found that recovering wasn’t as easy as it used to be because the world no longer necessarily belonged to men. The best way I could describe the podcast was a touchy-feely man-hug of a programme.

I don’t like bros-and-brew, Beavis-and-Butthead type podcasts, and I abhor aggressive ‘masculinity’. Yet, this was something different: masculinity-lite, largely harmless and benign. However, I’ve always found that there is perhaps something a little self-pitying about this kind of thing even if I can sympathise with the individual.

In fact, part of the reason I agreed to go on the show was that a friend had passed away in terrible suffering after being effectively banned from seeing his young son by his estranged wife’s narrative, the courts, and the pandemic. I knew he was desperately unhappy, and it was with this in mind that I wondered if a show like this would have made a difference to him—and if, possibly, he would still be with us today. On the other hand, despite a certain sympathy for “Dads for Justice” stories and the need for community and acceptance, I have also seen people drift from this into the rather paranoid anti-feminism and some rather nasty politics.

But there I was, sitting across from a host who was lamenting the community his father belonged to while speaking like a pre-millennium BBC Radio 1 DJ, with whiffs of “OOOO Gary Davies, AAAA Gary Davies. OOOO Gary Davies on your radiOOOO.” He had a ridiculous, almost Jedward quiff, gold bracelets, a signet ring, and frankly looked face-creamed up to the arsehole. He looked like a top-shagger. The type who would call women in the office ‘darling’.

The Encounter & The Unraveling

We did around a thirty-minute interview, tracking the standard trajectory of a life spent navigating the creative margins. I talked about growing up feeling like an outsider after a childhood spell abroad, and how I later used humour as a defence mechanism against social awkwardness. I touched on the familiar creative cycle: the early attempts at comedy, radio, and screenwriting, followed by the inevitable wall of knockbacks that eventually led me to an almost conventional career in international teaching.

As we discussed the tension between abandoning creative ambitions and the practical need to earn a living, the conversation shifted to modern motivational culture. I offered some criticisms of the idea that anyone can achieve anything if they simply “believe,” pointing out the modern paradox that society simultaneously tells young people they are limitless while encouraging them to focus heavily on their vulnerabilities.

Then we touched on the personal: my first marriage breakdown and the lessons learned; the sudden, shattering impact of the Welsh footballer Gary Speed’s suicide, an event which forced me to confront my own unhappiness and seek change; and the difficult, unstable periods of loneliness that come with starting over.

Finally, we spoke about meeting my second wife, what makes a mature marriage work—namely, an acceptance of each other’s flaws—and the eventual birth of Talking Istanbullocks. The podcast was a project born from anger, frustration, and a desire to regain control over my life, not entirely different from the host’s own journey.

My basic message throughout was simple: I have encountered lots of difficulties, but I’m not going to point the finger at others. I explicitly said on air that I refused to blame my ex-wife or speak about her disrespectfully because, despite the pain, she hadn’t abused or mistreated me. I accept my own failings.

Before we went on air, the host had endlessly detailed how a woman named Suzanne had left him broken-hearted just a month ago. I was sympathetic, but it certainly wasn’t what I expected from a stranger. So, I hurtled through all my usual patter, for fear that I wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgeways.

Yet the biggest shock came after the show. Once the microphones were off, he talked to me non-stop for another half an hour. He burst into floods of tears over Suzanne and then shared the agonising nugget that his brother had recently been arrested. He assured me of his brother’s innocence, but the situation had left him shattered.

Suzanne made a few more cameos. Short of making a few sympathetic noises, my part in the conversation was entirely redundant; it was a completely one-sided overshare. Vulnerable to the point of desperation, yet it was totally at odds with the modern, sensitive archetype he projected. Instead, he launched into a pub version of himself. The Radio 1 DJ voice was completely replaced by a dire Danny Dyer impression: “Well, you see kids, vese days... VESE DAYS, right?... ve kids. Vey’re all facking snowflakes. VESE DAYS. KIDS. Huh! Know what I’m saying, mate?”

It was a startling contradiction. The façade and the inner life seemed to belong to two completely different people. I texted him the next day, telling him that I had enjoyed the chat and that if he ever wanted to talk, I would be happy to catch up.

I never heard from him again.

The Cultural Critique

I guess he felt that he had humiliated himself in front of me and decided that the best solution was avoidance. In that, I feel deeply sorry for him, but it was hard to process. I’ve met and avoided men superficially like him before: metrosexual men whose entire identity is built around projecting confidence, success, and old-school masculinity, but who remain emotionally threadbare underneath.

Perhaps the accessories, the skin products, the DJ voice, and the hair were little more than armour. But when that armour fails, the collapse is total, and I witnessed it. This is the inherent trap of the “masculinity-lite” subculture. It purports to offer a modern, sensitive space for the broken-hearted male, yet it remains tethered to the loudest, emptiest clichés of the pub philosopher. Poor me. Poor me. Pour me another drink.

We need a better way to cope than this.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether my story didn’t quite fit the framework he was used to. There was no villain in it. There was no evil ex-wife nor grand explanation for disappointment beyond bad decisions, bad luck, and the ordinary messiness of being human.

The poor guy seemed to be trapped in a loop of grief and grievance. And therein lies the danger. When individual pain isn’t met with genuine, unglamorous self-reflection, it can curdle. I am not suggesting that this is the route that the host would choose, but my fear is that it can be a very short, perilous step from “Suzanne broke my heart” to “the modern world is rigged against men,” shifting seamlessly from tears of self-pity to the toxic, reactionary politics of the manosphere.

Subscribe now

The Bittersweet Conclusion

Of course, I had forgotten all about the encounter until recently, when I was googling something and found the interview sitting there on YouTube.

The interview is still out there in the digital ether—thirty minutes of polished, civilised, and entertaining broadcasting. Any listener would easily grasp what the filling of the sandwich was, but they would have no clue about how unconventionally baked the bread was. Looking at it now, the contrast is almost comic in itself, but it is also rather sad. Human beings are full of contradictions. On the screen, there is the meticulously groomed presenter, executing his format perfectly. But when I look at the quiff, the structured eyebrows, and the gold jewellery now, I don’t see confidence; I see fear.

I offered him a genuine, no-strings lifeline the next day—a simple human gesture from one bloke to another. I do understand that for a man so concerned with outward appearances, facing someone who has seen him step so completely out of character can induce a sense of vulnerability or shame. That is understandable. Possibly, in running his “healing” podcast, he had forgotten how to actually practise it.

Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that the fashionable, performative cyber-healing of the internet is no replacement for genuine self-reflection. It left me wondering just how many of these self-appointed gurus of modern manhood are loudly decrying “snowflakes” in public, while entirely unraveling behind closed doors.

If you enjoyed this essay, you may like these others on similar themes:

This Substack is reader-supported. If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Australia has decided that children under sixteen should not be on social media and now the UK is mooting similar, and other countries are certain to follow. It’s a clean, decisive policy—rare enough in modern politics to make us feel almost nostalgic for those halcyon pre-culture war days.

The arguments for it are reasonably factual, familiar and not hard to agree with in theory: teenagers lack impulse control; algorithms amplify anxiety and addiction; sleep suffers; bullying takes on new and more sinister forms and physical health and social skills suffer due to children rarely physically meeting.

The arguments against are just as compelling: online spaces can be lifelines, especially for the marginalised. Prohibition provokes secrecy. And there is the question of data. How, exactly, do you prove someone is sixteen without handing over more than you should? And of course, if every other child in Alfie or Olivia’s class has TikTok, it’s probably safe, right?

Modern parenting is fraught with seemingly impossible trade-offs: keep the kids off social media, they’ll get bullied, allow them on it, they’ll get bullied.

All of these arguments have some validity, but what interests me more is the assumption underneath it: that this is an entirely new problem.

It isn’t. Human nature doesn’t change, merely the tools that we use.

When I was a child, the concern wasn’t screens but streets. Children had poor impulse control back then too—it just manifested itself physically rather than digitally. We ran through people’s gardens, knocked on doors and ran away, started fires, performed dangerous stunts on bikes and rope swings, sampled substances, performed park bench anatomical experiments - you name it. Risks were taken not with the intent of finding illicit content, but with the simple escalating effect of unsupervised youthful curiosity.

My parents had a catchall term for the above, “up to no good,” and did not permit me to “get up to no good” after darkness had set in, but summer evenings and school holidays barely shielded me from teenage reality.

My parents were protecting me from the unknown dangers of the streets, much as today’s parents want to do, from the unknown evils of the internet.

They had asked themselves the reasonably logical question: what possible dangers could befall him, locked up at home?

But in this life, reasonably logical is not exactly the same as logical.

Perhaps there was no social media then, but there was still media. And then as now, it liked to stoke up fear and paranoia.

The 1980s—at least in the Anglosphere—were saturated with a peculiar obsession with Satanism. From films like The Omen to Robin of Sherwood on afternoon television, diabolical rituals were omnipresent. As a paper boy, I read the Sunday papers while I delivered them with a transgressive all-consuming anticipation. I became an expert at spotting the forbidden words like devil, evil, sex, ritual, Satan at fifty paces in print. The printed word served to prove that these horror movies were real.

As a reader, and worse, a thinker, I didn’t just consume this material; I metabolised it. Quietly, privately, I built an internal world that was far more frightening than anything I could ever have encountered outside.

This was protection at its most inadequate.

In practice, it made me an outlier. While other children roamed the streets, I stayed in. They formed their social hierarchies in the half-light of parks and streets; I was excluded from them and, inevitably, mocked for it.

So I did what children always do when the external world is restricted: I built another one.

Books, television, newspapers—these became my territory. It looked safe from the outside. It wasn’t. My parents knew where I was physically, but had very little sense of where I was psychologically. The material I absorbed, the fears I constructed, the ideas I wrestled with—I handled all of it alone.

There were no counsellors. The therapeutic vocabulary that we all have at our fingertips today was exclusively guarded by psychiatric practitioners or patients. The only consultation available to me was the private negotiation with whatever had taken root in my head.

When I look at social media now, I don’t see an entirely new phenomenon. I see the same old fears and fascinations, delivered through different machinery. We worry about children disappearing into their phones, down algorithmic rabbit holes that parents neither see nor understand. It’s a rational fear, but that disappearance isn’t new. It used to happen in bedrooms, with books and television and imagination before we even knew what an algorithm was.

Restrictions on any form of behaviour, meanwhile, were as successful in my childhood as they are now. You can ban what you like but don’t expect to eliminate desire for it - in fact, it almost always has the opposite effect. Children, being children, finnd workarounds. Some of us simply internalised the rebellion instead of acting it out.

Leave a comment

Banning social media for under-16s may reduce certain dangers. It may improve sleep, limit exposure, and make some forms of bullying and harassment harder. But what it doesn’t do is address the underlying reality: children are porous. They absorb what is around them, and if you close off one channel, they will find—or create—another.

The deeper question is not so much what we ban, but what we replace it with.

If you take away the digital world, do you expand the physical one? Do you give children more freedom, more responsibility, more guided exposure to risk? Or do you simply narrow their lives and hope that absence itself is a form of protection?

Because a child who is physically safe but psychologically adrift is not necessarily safer.

I wasn’t in danger on the streets. I was in danger in my own head. Living proof that protection doesn’t eliminate danger – it just challenges it to find a better hiding place.

This Substack is reader-supported. That means there’s no paywall-heavy publishing machine behind it, no advertising department. Just writing, and the time it takes to do it properly.

If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

“Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide. Gonna fiiiiiiiind you and take it slowly.”

Darren sang with tuneless enthusiasm. He stopped and checked his speedometer and glanced over the long silver bonnet at the open road. Fine. He got overexcited sometimes listening to the Fugees and didn’t want to get caught by a hidden speed camera.

He’d be home soon. Twelve days away from having to clutch the dual-controls or sombrely explain to excited seventeen-year-olds that “this is the most dangerous weapon I hope you’ll ever lay your hands on.”

He was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He wasn’t going to repeat the fiasco of last year, trailing round the half-empty shelves of Woolworths in a panic.

***

“That was a lovely lunch, Noreen. I feel like I could explode. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, mum. Just make sure you give me a ring the minute you get home. It’s getting dark and there are idiots out on the road.”

“Don’t worry about me, love, I’ll be fine.”

She got in her car and did her customary toot—that was her version of a wave, but allowed her to keep both hands on the steering wheel. She switched on the tape player and hummed along to “Away In A Manger.” It was her favourite.

She pulled out of the carpark and turned right.

It was one of those miserable winter days when it never really got light. The fields on both sides of the road were still covered in frost that hadn’t thawed. They glistened when the headlights caught them. She couldn’t wait to get home and put her feet up to watch Countdown.

The wintry fingers of a tree hung over a warning sign. After a moment’s thought as she approached the T-junction, she turned right.

***

Darren drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and sang louder as the road opened out ahead of him.

***

The flashing blue lights turned the freezing fog into a daunting kaleidoscope. A young journalist pressed against the cold boundary of the police tape, notebook trembling in hand.

A paramedic draped a heavy blanket around a pair of shivering shoulders. “Breathe deeply. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I’m fine, I just...”

The reporter choked on the foul smell of petrol and steam coming from the bonnet of the Ford Fiesta. “What happened, Officer?”

The rear number plate hung off the silver Cavalier, its bonnet crushed like a concertina, welded into the barrier of the central reservation.

Firefighters moved silently between the wrecked vehicles.

And then nobody seemed interested in the Cavalier anymore.

“It’s not good. Full-on frontal collision. Cavalier tried to swerve. One fatality. Come and take a look.”

Shattered glass and blood-stained shards of plastic intermingled with the gifts that had only been bought an hour earlier. Among the wreckage, a cracked Spice Girls CD—still sealed in its cellophane wrapper. A Buzz Lightyear figure, a game of Jenga, and a pocket-sized Nokia mobile, still intact in their boxes, festooned the crushed interior of the car. On the back seat, completely untouched by the violence of the impact, sat a five-foot fibre-optic tree, waiting inside its cardboard Argos box.

The reporter looked at the tree, then closed his notebook.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this story, you may enjoy the following:

This Substack is reader-supported. That means if you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, please click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Leave a comment

“I will grant you anything you could ever wish for on this earth.”
A murmur of excitement.
“You can have it all, but there are conditions.”
Excitement giving way to caution.
“You can only have it for twenty-four years, and then you will die.”
Gasps.
“I am not your English teacher, but the Devil.”

The Arithmetic of Teenage Certainty

That was how I started the new unit for my Year 8 class on Dr Faustus, the Elizabethan tragedy by Shakespeare’s enigmatic contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was a probable spy, occasional brawler, religious irritant, alleged homosexual, and a man who managed to be stabbed in the brain in a Deptford tavern argument at the age of twenty-nine. Most importantly, he was a suspected heretic — which, in Elizabethan England, tended to do little for one’s career prospects.

Marlowe was probably not the most conventional of men. In his play, and earlier German versions of the tale, Dr Faustus grows bored of the daily drudge and conjures up a demonic upgrade package. He signs a contract with Lucifer and trades eternity for twenty-four years of power, knowledge, and miscellaneous indulgence.

There is no ambiguity in the T&Cs. It is 100% clear. The consequences are not reversible. But, crucially, then as now, very few people bother to read the small print properly. Faustus is not a truly evil man; he spends his life torn between power and repentance, but human nature prevails in the end. He is eventually dragged away to his rather unpleasant fate.

My class were torn between the merchandise on offer and the cost. They naturally needed some clarification on whether the power to fly, print money, or become invisible were part of the temporary omnipotence package. Smiles and comments were shared until the first doubt emerged: “Would we have to stay in hell forever?”

“Forever and ever. Amen,” I responded.

The mood changed. Then one student, Maya, somewhere between a whisper to her friend and a comment designed to be overheard, muttered, “I’d take it. I’d be 36 or 37. There’s nothing worth living for after the age of thirty-five.”

The class understood the transactional nature of it all immediately. Not as theology, not as literature—just the cold arithmetic of time.

I felt a flicker of irritation at Maya’s comment. Not so much at the logic, but more at the tone—that familiar teenage certainty that adulthood is either distant or doomed to derision. I stayed calm, but the thought stayed with me.

Because I recognised it.

Leave a comment

It occurred to me that, rather aptly, about twenty-four years ago, my parents told me about a night out they and their friends had enjoyed. Drinking, laughing, slightly misbehaving, and possibly climbing over a fence or gate or two while in their cups—nothing overly dramatic.

I remember that I smiled politely and thought, with a sneering superiority reserved only for the young, that this was “small-time stuff.” Mild, predictable, slightly embarrassing. Pretending to have a life. It is strange looking back now. Even though I kept my unkind thoughts to myself, I am actually ashamed of having thought that way. Not because I was uniquely arrogant, but because I was so sure I wasn’t.

My childhood was relatively comfortable and conventional, but tightly held—as if secured by steel rather than supported by softness. I was creative and rebellious, but there was an authoritarian edge to my upbringing that I feared testing. Consequently, I yearned for the independence and freedom that adulthood promised, even though I had no idea what it contained. Because I didn’t quite know what to do with that freedom, it often involved poor choices and wild shenanigans that actually hindered me far more than they helped.

The Currency of Chaos

From my teens to my early thirties, I seemed to believe that adulthood was something you earned by escaping other people’s illusions. I believed that fun—real fun—had to involve a certain degree of danger, unpredictability, and perhaps even self-sabotage. Freedom, as I understood it then, came with collateral damage. If it didn’t, it probably wasn’t real.

That version of freedom didn’t last. It meant unnecessary risk and occasional chaos that didn’t always stay neatly contained. It took until my forties for something to shift properly: not quite the disappearance of fun, but certainly the disappearance of the tariffs it used to carry. Oddly, I don’t have many entertaining stories to tell from the last few years. Yet, I’m happier.

A Cappella in Crete (and Other Low-Stakes Tragedies)

Now, I can indulge in a drink when I choose without being unsafe. I can have a night out without it requiring a recovery period for the soul. In fact, in the last decade, the only public embarrassment I can recall is singing the Welsh national anthem a cappella in a taverna in Crete with a friend last summer—something most witnesses seemed to enjoy, and nobody needed to call the authorities over.

That difference matters more than it sounds. What I used to call freedom was often just unmanaged intensity and simple rebellion. What I have now is something quieter but more reliable: enjoyment without the hangover of identity damage.

Looking back, I see that my earlier judgment of my parents and their friends wasn’t really about them. I really wish I’d listened to their story more closely. I was in that late-adolescent phase where I dismissed their joy as tame and undignified. I was operating under the naive belief that I had a monopoly on fun and was much more sophisticated than I actually was.

My contempt was not only reserved for the older generation, but also for my peers. I was convinced there was something faintly tragic about students who attended toga parties and James Bond-themed soirées. What I dismissed as “organised fun” was actually just a different relationship to risk—they chose containment, chaos chose me. They probably had just as much fun as I was having, just differently structured and with fewer consequences.

Moving Beyond the Binary

What linked the middle-aged reveller and the party-goers was what Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye dismissed as “phonies.” I used to think I could divide people into two binary categories: authentic and fakers. Age has taught me to soften the Caulfield rhetoric.

To believe otherwise is an adolescent theory of human beings. I shared this thought with Maya. It took me a while to understand that people are not so easy to slot into binary boxes. They are mixtures of imitation, aspiration, habit, and occasional clarity.

Adolescence is the point where you are no longer physically or emotionally dependent on your parents and are desperate to scratch out your own identity. This involves trial and error; in all but the most extreme cases, it involves copying others in dress, musical taste, and attitude. The uncomfortable truth is that, individual though I was, I also fell into the trap of pretending to be more exotic and detached than I actually was. It wasn’t out of deceit, but out of the human pressure to be legible as a certain kind of person.

Adulthood—something that kicks in at around the age Maya considers to be virtual death—grants a freedom that, were teenagers to have it, would remove a great deal of the pain of growing up overnight. It is the gift of no longer giving a fuck what anyone thinks about you, what you wear, or what music you listen to.

That is probably what Maya was missing. The idea that life might be “over” in the mid-thirties comes from confusing novelty with value and visibility with contentment. But what actually happens is not an ending, but a reduction in unnecessary noise. The mid-thirties and early forties are the pinnacle: still energetic, but with more emotional stability. Add financial grounding and fewer identity experiments conducted in public, and you reach the crucial realisation: it doesn’t matter whether you are being properly witnessed while living.

Lucifer’s Real Trick

The tragedy is not that Faustus wanted too much, but that he misunderstood what he already had. At this stage of life, I don’t think about Faustus only in terms of bargains or damnation. I think about perception. Faustus doesn’t just lose his soul; he loses his ability to imagine that anything he has is enough. Lucifer’s real trick is convincing him that because he could have more, he actually possesses nothing of worth.

Adulthood, when it works, is not about becoming more serious. It is about becoming less urgently fictional about yourself. We realise that twenty-four years of magic is a pittance compared to the quiet, unwitnessed freedom of finally being oneself. I suspect Maya will figure that out eventually—hopefully without the need for a signature in blood.

Subscribe now

This Substack is reader-supported. That means there’s no paywall-heavy publishing machine behind it, no advertising department. Just writing, and the time it takes to do it properly.

If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Leave a comment

I’ve always hated my birthday. There should be fanfare, trumpets playing, and gold carriages pulled by plume-beheadressed zebras parading through the streets of London. The world has a right, nay a need, to know that ego sum—the ego has landed. This is not just anyone’s birthday; it’s my birthday.

But then, cutting through the self-centred splendour, strikes the unavoidable question: “Everybody has a birthday—so why should mine matter?”

Blur’s painfully melancholic ‘Birthday’ starts to play in my head, and all the thrill of self-celebration has turned to desolation. A part of me yearns to be the centre of attention, and yet simultaneously I find something loathsome and repugnant about this self-indulgence, and I despair at the depths of my shallowness.

It is impossible to please me, and I hate myself for it. As I have been told on many occasions, it must be exhausting being me.

Subscribe now

My fiftieth birthday was, without question, the worst. Not so much because of the magnitude of a half century and the familiar fears many of us would feel, but because it triggered a vivid, almost uncontrollable resurrection of my mother within me—the part of her I had never fully disentangled from myself.

After a surprisingly smooth start, attempting to be considerate toward my gentle wife, I felt myself engulfed by my mother: her grief, her shattered childhood, and her painstaking drive to erase her own misery through perfect motherhood, all flooding my own body.

A silent witness, I cradled her, forgave her, whispered comfort as if she were the child I had never held and I the parent. Even a birthday breakfast poached egg on toast took on a Proustian, almost ‘transsubstantiatory’ weight, each bite suffused with her real, haunting presence within my overweight, middle-aged male frame. The adult part of me observed, trapped behind a thin membrane—like the egg my mother used to crack for me every morning—unable to intervene, only able to offer solace through my tears.

My wife, herself walking on eggshells, reminded me that my mother’s awful, short life—and the trauma she bequeathed—had never been my fault. But in that moment, I was simultaneously her child, her parent, and her only companion in that morning’s private storm. I fell into floods of tears: sobbing, wailing, rocking and cradling her, myself, and the vulnerable infant I had once been.

I announced by midday that the party would be cancelled, the guests may be informed or may not, and there would be no cake nor the Sinatra and Martin songs I had been meticulously rehearsing for weeks.

My body felt spent, a heaviness pressing down on every muscle and thought. After hours of exhaustion and despair, valuing my marriage, I reluctantly yielded, performing two songs of very much second-rehearsal quality, but the day had left me raw, as if decades of unresolved maternal complexity had collapsed onto a single calendar page.

Leave a comment

This reaction was not new. My first, and certainly not last, miserable birthday in memory—where I secretly cried until, out of sheer exhaustion, I fell into a deep slumber against my sodden pillow—was my eighth. I was overwhelmed by the paradox of wanting attention and loathing the vanity that went with it. I refused my 21st birthday party until parental coercion overturned my adolescent ruling: how could I bear to be the centre of attention—at least on anyone else’s terms?

Birthdays should be straightforward, joyous events, with simple gestures of meaningful love and friendship, but in my case, even the fleeting moments of joy and appreciation have all too often been juxtaposed with tension: the needs that I simply can’t articulate lucidly, my past, my mother’s shadow, and the Blur lyric looping endlessly in my mind.

That day, as on others, I realised that part of me had always been tasked with understanding her, protecting her from the abuse she suffered and in turn passed on to me, and somehow balancing the inherited weight of intergenerational trauma, while also maintaining a life that was mine alone. It is a paradoxical inheritance: deep love and hurt intertwined, shaping every aspect of how I navigate the world.

And yet, despite the pain, despite the absurdity, there is humour, reflection, and the recognition that these late summer years still contain hope, beauty and a richness because of the innate privilege of optimism and curiosity—gifts denied to her, but which make up half of the inner me.

This Substack is reader-supported. That means there’s no paywall-heavy publishing machine behind it, no advertising department. Just writing, and the time it takes to do it properly.

If you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, you can subscribe or contribute as a way of keeping the work going. Think of it as buying the writer a coffee, a pint, or occasionally a few uninterrupted hours to think and write. You can click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

Leave a comment

“Psychodrama.” This word is doing the rounds among the British political chattering classes at the moment. Now, for any members of the thespian or psychotherapist communities intrigued about how the government is role-playing, it doesn’t mean quite what you may think and largely translates to: “fucking chaos.”

Keir Starmer seems to be in his death throes as Prime Minister. Machiavellian manoeuvres, briefings, and mutterings from ambitious colleagues circle around Westminster while Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham plays the role of “King in the North.” It is all very Game of Thrones.

Labour were predictably given a kicking in the May 2026 local and devolved elections, losing ground to the right-wing populist Reform UK in parts of England and Wales, while the Greens continued to squeeze them in London and among younger urban voters. Meanwhile, Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties completed the declawing of the Labour beast in their respective parliaments. The conclusion from much of the media is simple: it’s Keir Starmer’s fault.

Regardless of the unimaginative labels such as “Worst Prime Minister Ever” or “Liebour”, the real issue is simpler: Keir Starmer is deeply dull. He lacks warmth, theatricality, and charisma. He speaks like an adenoidal senior civil servant trapped in the body of a headmaster.

The Grown-Ups in the Room

And yet, two years ago, this was precisely what the country claimed to want. We were tired of Conservative leadership coups. Tired of five Conservative prime ministers in eight years. After the sheer carnivalesque chaos of the admittedly entertaining Boris Johnson’s failed cult-of-personality style of governance and the lettuce-speed implosion of Liz Truss, Britain talked endlessly about getting the “grown-ups back in the room.”

Starmer’s technocratic dullness was not hidden from the electorate in 2024; it was the selling point. We were not exactly charmed by, but reassured by, the steady droning of his “my father was a toolmaker” mantra.

And then we weren’t.

Subscribe now

After the stiffness and fall from grace of the largely decent Theresa May, what we really needed was a PM who could tell a good joke. And then we didn’t. We wanted a grown-up in the room, and now we don’t. Andy Burnham and the populists Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski offer far better stories and that bit of missing colour. We’re bored of adults, and now we need another performer to sit on the throne. Until we don’t.

Within weeks of Starmer’s victory, social media had already settled on its verdict and did what social media does best: created a hyperbolic and unscrutinised trope to launch into the algorithmic ether: “Starmer: Worst Prime Minister Ever.” Uninspiring though he may be, it is difficult to see how this claim can be argued seriously in a country that recently endured Boris Johnson—the pandemic-partying Pinocchio—and Liz Truss who detonated the economy in under two months with her unique brand of chiropteran guano.

But modern politics is no longer entirely ‘rational’. These issues are no longer political or economic so much as emotive.

Buying a Cat and Demanding a Bark

I am not a cheerleader for Starmer. Let me make this clear. I did not vote Labour and am not ideologically aligned with his or any other party. Yet, he is neither the worst nor the best PM. His record has been mixed. If he were a GCSE paper, he would probably be a solid Grade C, with the possibility of a low B after a successful remark. That is fairly normal for a prime minister. Most governments disappoint because governing itself is disappointing.

The economic reality facing any government since 2008 has been grim. Britain never fully recovered from the financial crash and then absorbed Brexit, Covid, and the Ukraine war in rapid succession. Public services are exhausted, wages have stagnated, and the electorate is angry.

In short, we buy a cat and complain when it does not bark.

Leave a comment

We throw our toys out of the pram the moment arithmetic intervenes. When Labour targeted National Insurance contributions to generate revenue, the predictable outcry from the business sector clashed directly with the public’s demand for fully funded hospitals. This is the impossible circle of modern democratic politics: demanding American taxation with Scandinavian public services, where the government is inherently blamed for both the problem and the solution.

But arithmetic and facts no longer win arguments. Mastery of the dark arts of social media does.

The ‘Premier-Leagueification’ of Whitehall

Starmer’s real problem is not policy so much as performance. He attempts to answer emotional claims with factual rebuttals and white papers. Unfortunately, modern politics increasingly resembles entertainment culture, where feelings matter more than detail and narrative matters more than truth. Nobody remembers what Starmer says. People remember Boris Johnson hiding in a fridge, Nigel Farage drinking a pint, or Liz Truss being outlasted by a lettuce.

Political culture and its media coverage are now shaped by the culture of the English Premier League, the most glamorous domestic sports competition in the world. Allow that to sink in for a moment.

When I was a child, Margaret Thatcher governed Britain for eleven years and Brian Clough managed Nottingham Forest Football Club for nearly two decades. Both were divisive figures, but institutions still valued stability back then. Today, Chelsea can discard managers like used batteries, while football phone-ins demand sackings after three bad results.

TalkSport and rolling sports media discovered something important long before political broadcasters caught on: the outrage of the common man is profitable. Football itself is not remotely eventful or interesting enough to sustain twenty-four-hour debate, so the debate had to be created and made theatrical. Endless speculation, fury, and tribalism filled the gaps between matches and eventually, it removed all stability and predictability.

Politics has simply copied the model.

The Age of Discontented Content

Politics is really rather unexciting. When it works, it should be virtually invisible. Yet, rolling news networks and social media have programmed part of the public to expect permanent crisis and instant gratification. Every setback becomes a humiliation while every compromise becomes a betrayal: each leader is either a saviour or the “worst ever.” In the ‘Premier Leagueification’ of politics, government has all the stability of a Premier League football club run by a mercurial Russian oligarch.

The result is a country trapped in permanent overreaction.

Social media has accelerated this into something close to national psychosis. Most people now receive news through algorithms designed not to inform them, but to agitate them. Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population spends huge chunks of their day “doomscrolling” on their smartphones: actively searching for the gratification of having one’s biases confirmed, and the outrage at the stupidity of those who can’t see what they can see. Minor issues become existential crises within hours, and complex economic realities are compressed into memes digestible enough to survive the attention span of a phone screen.

This environment naturally rewards performers over administrators.

Subscribe now

Nigel Farage understands this perfectly. Far better as a communicator than a policymaker, he dominates debate because he fundamentally understands and taps into the emotional language of modern media. His supporters are not responding to detailed fiscal programmes; they are responding to tone, identity, and performance. Like Donald Trump, he presents himself not as a conventional politician but as an entertaining disruption to a system people increasingly distrust.

Meanwhile, Starmer still behaves as though politics is governed by briefing papers, committee meetings, and measured press conferences.

It is no more.

As I sit watching Sunday morning politics shows filled with panic about plots, briefings, and leadership speculation, it occurs to me that Britain no longer behaves like a serious country. Politics has become mere ‘content’.

Discontented content.

Leaders are consumed like football managers or reality television contestants. We demand instant transformation, become bored almost immediately, and then begin hunting for the next big personality.

We do not know what we want anymore. We only know that if the game is not emotionally gratifying within five minutes, we no longer wish to play.

If you enjoyed this piece, I have written a three part essay called The Accidental Authoritarian, explaining how formerly moderate people are drawn to extreme views today. Here it is in spoken word format but can also be read as individual written pieces

You may also enjoy this:

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

If you enjoyed my writing and have read so far, please consider paying a small contribution by clicking the purple button above.

If you can’t afford to do that, please be sure to support me by subscribing, liking and commenting so that this piece activates the algorithm and more people get it in their feeds.

“I’ve got to go. Speak to you later.”

Alex breathed deeply and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He stopped and checked the coordinates on his phone and realised he was just a two-minute walk away. He sighed with relief.

He hitched up his trousers at the front, unaware that he was showing a builder’s money box at the back as he hobbled down the pedestrian street in the Friday evening dusk.

He was early, but he reasoned that that gave him the advantage.

He checked the name of the business above the door and entered gingerly, looking around, trying to scan the room without anyone noticing him.

He made his way to the bar and ordered a pint of Guinness. He didn’t really like it, but it was fashionable on Instagram and it was important to blend in. He checked his phone and noticed people were online, but no one had replied to his specific “I’m five minutes away!” message.

He picked up his glass with two hands, cradling it, and slurped it before turning round and spotting Jess, Nicola, Mark, Michael and Jimmy at the table in the corner.

He smiled and walked over to them. Nicola saw him and made eye contact; the corner of her mouth curled up in a faint smile that lingered. Jess and Mark looked at her and laughed raucously. Nicola looked away.

Alex made his way over to the table.

“Any room for a small one?”

Jimmy and Michael nodded and grinned.

“Take a seat, Alex.”

“I just need to clear some space for me to put my Guinness beer on the table. You can’t have drunk so much already — it’s not seven o’clock yet.”

“Well, we’ve been here since straight after work, haven’t we?” Michael said. Jess shot him a look.

“Oh, I must have misunderstood. I thought we were meeting at 7.15. Guess I must have been mistaken. Alright,” he said, smiling too broadly. “What have I missed? World peace?”

A couple of people laughed a little and tried to remember where they had left their conversations. He sat down without waiting for an invitation and leaned forward as if the conversation had already been happening and he was simply joining mid-sentence.

“Great job on that spreadsheet audit, Alex. Saved us a week of work,” Jess smiled.

Alex’s face lit up.

“Yes. I used a VLOOKUP. It’s like a digital bloodhound.”

The table went quiet. The compliment was a dead end.

Mark told a joke about Jeffrey Epstein. Everyone laughed.

“I know a joke. I know a joke!”

The group gazed at Alex.

“…so I said to him, I wanted ping pong balls — not King Kong’s balls.”

Alex laughed uproariously at his own joke. Polite smiles around the table. The bright light briefly caught him off guard. He took his glasses off and rubbed his forehead. Mark flexed his fingers and stared at his fingertips.

Nicola caught his eye and mimed wiping something from her top lip.

Alex stared at her for a moment, incredulous, then the penny dropped. He realised he had creamy stout on his top lip and a little hanging from his nasal hair like a snowdrop.

The group was drinking quickly and soon he felt loosened up and ordered another pint of Guinness. It had been the first time he’d been out in a group since his 50th birthday. It felt good.

The table rarely spoke together and frequently split into two or three mini-groups before regrouping. It was all rather peculiar. He didn’t know if there was a system to be figured out, but he did his best to fit in.

At first he was manageable. He had a way of talking that made everything slightly unstable but still recognisable as social interaction. He nodded too much, interrupted too late, laughed just after everyone else had stopped.

Then he decided to go crazy and have a third beer. After all, he didn’t get out very often and some of the party had already had much more than that.

Jimmy stood up to leave, saying he needed an early night as he had to pick up a van the next morning.

“What kind of van?” Alex asked.

Jimmy stared at him quizzically. “Fuck knows. I’m helping my sister move house.”

“I hired a van once…”

A pause that nobody quite filled.

“I thought it would be really cool to get a mattress in the back and some hot chicks and the passion wagon all the way down to Marrakech.”

His eyes shone behind thick spectacles and he chuckled, giving a porcine grunt. A bead of saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth.

Jimmy swore under his breath and headed to the door, waving as his friends said goodbye.

“Don’t worry. I’m just joking. I don’t even have a driving licence.”

There was a small shift around the table — the table recalibrated — and Alex looked around eagerly to see which face would be most likely to engage with him.

This was fun. Conversations stopped and started so quickly, and there was a lot of laughter. He was sitting next to Nicola. She smelled nice. He wondered if she was married.

The conversation moved, but he kept circling it, like someone returning to a point on a map only he could see.

Nicola had to go home. Apparently she had left a pan on.

Suddenly, Michael announced, “Fucking hell! I’ve just checked work email and they’ve said to be vigilant this weekend. Police are swooping at several addresses in Hatherleigh and some guy got his door kicked in — they thought he was a terrorist. Apparently we’ve not to be alarmed if there’re road blocks on the way back. No more details yet as to who they’re looking for.”

Alex’s face brightened immediately.

“Oh yeah,” he said, too quickly. “I heard about that. They were looking for me.”

A pause. All eyes fell on him. He had their attention for the first real time that evening.

“What for?” Mark asked.

“I raped someone last night.”

No laughter followed. Not even the nervous reflex kind.

He held the grin a fraction too long.

“No! I’m just joking. Sorry. My sense of humour is a bit wacky at times.”

He waited for the tension to dissipate, for laughter, for someone to slap him on the back.

But it didn’t. He took a drink instead, as if that had gone as intended.

After that, the evening thinned. People found reasons to leave.

Eventually there were only fragments of goodbye.

“See you on Monday, Alex.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Course. Yeah.”

He stayed seated, slightly forward, still trying to catch the rhythm of a room that had already stopped including him. He looked at his half-empty Guinness, the creamy head now brown and looking like frothy slug trails.

Then he stood up slowly and limped out into the night.

The street home was quiet. Cold enough that his breath showed briefly and then disappeared.

He walked, hands in pockets, head slightly down. At a corner, he stopped and checked something on his phone, then trudged on.

A few minutes later, he turned into a small side street and hopped up a set of worn steps to a modest building. He let himself in carefully, as if not wanting to wake anything.

He glided along the hallway, switched on a low light, took off his shoes neatly, listened for a moment, then relaxed when he heard nothing.

In the spare room, he opened the door gingerly. He had to be quiet.

Two kittens came stumbling forward over folded blankets and old towels, mewing urgently.

His face changed without announcement.

“Alright, alright,” he said softly. “I’m here. I’m here.”

He crouched down, smiled benignly, and stroked them with unhurried gentleness.

“Do you guys need foodies?”

He fed them carefully, watching them eat as if this was the only part of the day that made sense.

When they had settled, he sat back on the edge of the bed for a moment, then picked up his phone.

“Hi, Mum,” he said when she picked up.

He listened for a long time, nodding occasionally.

“Yes,” he said. “Sorry. I was out with friends.”

A beat.

“Yes, thanks. Lots of fun.”

Outside, the streetlight flickered.

If you enjoyed this story, you may enjoy some of my other short stories:

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

If you enjoyed this story or it moved you and you would like to read more like it, please consider paying a small contribution by clicking the purple Buy Me A Coffee button directly above. If you can’t afford to do that, please be sure to support me by subscribing, liking and commenting so that this piece activates the algorithm and more people get it in their feeds.

Opening Note

This piece is not fiction. It is written as closely as possible to how the world appeared to me at the age of six: complete, orderly, reassuring, and only dimly aware of its own fragility. I have resisted the temptation to interpret events with the knowledge I later acquired, or to smooth memory into narrative shape. What follows is not an explanation of what happened, but a record of what was known, noticed, misunderstood, and taken for granted at the time.

If it reads as innocent, that is because it was. If it reads as incomplete, that is because it could only ever have been so. Only later did it become clear how much of my certainty depended on a single, ordinary day continuing as expected. But it didn’t.

It would mean the world to me if you would click on one of the two links after you have read the story:

***

I was a very worldly six-year-old, it had to be said. Happy, balanced, bright as a button. I was the first name on the register at school, despite neither of my initials being anywhere near the beginning of the alphabet, and I had already had a long-term girlfriend, Carolynn Hunt, who I had unceremoniously ditched after a year. This separation happened not long after Louise Brown, the freckle-faced and nice-smelling beauty, had arrived at the school six months earlier. I collected Britain’s Crusaders and Turks toy soldiers and even had ambitions of building my own Lego castle one day. Life was great, and Mummy told me I was her bonny little boy and everything in life would simply fall at my feet. Life was simple.

Daddy took me to swimming lessons each week and, even though I sometimes pretended to have tummy ache on Friday afternoons before the lesson, Jim said I was good at it and called me ‘Tarzan’. My mum used to take me to the library on Thursdays after school, where I would instantly dive into the Bobby Brewster section. I could take three books out a fortnight and I knew I could probably get through two Bobby Brewsters and an illustrated Usborne book on Dinosaurs without breaking a sweat. I was good at Sums and Scripture and I knew Jesus loved me. My mum knew that I would look after her when I was grown up, even though we all knew my sister wouldn’t be bothered, and my Nanna called me Jamore or Holy Joe. I liked it when Nanna deliberately spat her false teeth out when mummy wasn’t looking to make me laugh. Her eyes looked like pale blue marbles that would pop out of her head. Mummy used to pretend to be angry with her when she did that and tell her not to do it when Daddy was around. I didn’t know why, because Daddy used to sing funny songs for me and tell great stories. Mummy was a bad singer. She cried when I told her that and promised I would never hear her sing again. I cuddled her so tight and told her I was so sorry, but she never did sing again. That was three years before, when I was a little boy.

I used to come home from school for dinner. Posh people called it ‘lunch’ but everybody knew that they were wrong. I only lived a six-minute run from school and I was allowed to come home on my own as long as I promised to wait for the Lollipop Lady. I think she was called that because she always looked like she was sucking a lollipop in her cheek, but you could never see the stick. Mummy told me not to stare at her lump. She always called me and my mum ‘love’ when she guided us across the road. It was common to call people ‘love’ or ‘mate’, but most common people meant well. They were fine so long as I didn’t end up like them. Tuesdays filled me with anxiety because you never knew what you were going to get for dinner, because they could offer my beloved Sausage, Mash and Beans or the dreaded Potato Pie, unless it was summer and then we had Pork Pie (yum) and Salad (yuck).

On a train to a really strange far-away place called London, where they said “batter” when they meant “butter” (but that was OK because I knew what they meant and was only ever confused and bitterly disappointed the first time), somebody said something nice to my mum. “Do you know you have the best-behaved children I have ever seen?” I looked up from my woodland animals colouring book and smiled politely, to order. My mum was so proud of this that she mentioned it for years after – even when that could no longer be said to be true.

We lived in a close-knit community. Nanna Hilda lived in the house where my mum and My Arthur had grown up and I could hop-scotch there in five minutes so long as I held Mummy’s hand when I crossed the road. Her house always smelled of cigarettes and pickled things. Our house didn’t smell of cigarettes anymore because Mummy had promised me she wouldn’t smoke again after Mrs Hamer told us that each cigarette took five minutes off your life. I hated pickled things but I ate them anyway. Uncle Frank was Nanna Hilda’s brother and he lived in the next street. He was really funny, except on Christmas Eve when he made us cry and Mummy shout at him by telling us what presents Father Christmas had got us. How could he know this? Apparently, it was because he knew Father Christmas and had a really big gob.

My Arthur lived round the corner from Uncle Frank. You could do a circuit from our house to Nanna’s and then Uncle Frank and Aunty Dorothy’s, then on to Arthur’s and then back to ours. Our house was best though, because we could see the horses in the field from our back kitchen and they could only see a wall or flowers from their back kitchens. Arthur was a pig and I wasn’t to grow up like him on any account. His house smelled of chips and he always sang along to songs on the radio that were very different from the songs in our house. He told me funny stories and took me on long walks. Sometimes he used to do really smelly pumps. His tummy came over his trousers and he lived with my cousins, but they weren’t really my cousins at the same time. I didn’t mind that they weren’t my real cousins (though I hadn’t to tell anyone because of something called a DEE-EYE-VEE-OH-ARE-SEA-EE), because Joanne helped me build some wings and taught me how to fly, and Steve was in his room all the time listening to records, and Kath wore a leather jacket and sat on the back of a motorbike ridden by a man with long hair and a moustache.

On Saturday mornings Daddy used to take me to the Building Society. I didn’t like the Building Society because it was boring, but I knew it was important to look after your money and that, if I didn’t complain, Daddy would buy me a farm animal from Boydell’s Toy Shop next door. After that he would take me to Carr’s Pasties and we would get a bag of warm pasties and meat pies and some cold ones for the freezer. It was a well-known fact that Molly Bentham couldn’t make pasties as well as Carr’s. Even Norma couldn’t, and she baked the best flour cakes in Smithills. Besides, no party was a party without Carr’s Pasties, but it was OK to make your own sausage rolls though.

On Saturday Daddy used to play football. Sometimes he came home muddy, but most weeks he came back looking very clean and happy but red-faced, and his breath smelled a bit funny. Mummy asked me if I wanted to watch my dad playing football, but I had seen him playing before in the garden with my orange ball so I didn’t need to. Besides, Saturdays were about watching black-and-white films on BBC2 because that was the channel which didn’t have sport on it. Sometimes a man with dark, wet, combed hair used to put his mouth on the pretty lady’s mouth and they would cuddle each other. This was called ‘kissing’ because mummy told me she was doing it with daddy once in the bedroom before school when I walked in and I was a bit frightened. It was very different from kisses normal people did. I planned that I would trap Louise Brown in the corner of the rain shelter and do kissing to her like the black-and-white people did, but mummy found the piece of paper where I had written out my plan and I pretended it was all a joke. My face went bright red and everyone laughed.

Sometimes when it was raining, I used to listen to my records. Daddy had built a record storage place out of toasted bricks under the record player. I didn’t like ABBA like my Nanna Edith did. They were terrible. Embarrassing and nowhere near as good as Kenny Rogers and Elton John, who we liked in our house. I preferred The Jungle Book though, especially ‘The Bare Necessities’, but I also liked Burl Ives and Roger Whittaker. When I was alone, I liked to listen to a song by Roger Whittaker about a creeping spider. I used to lie on my tummy imagining the spider’s legs running down my body. When I listened to this, the song made my tummy feel funny. I didn’t want Mummy and Daddy to know about this for some reason.

I liked PE at school because we used to climb up bars and bounce balls. PE was fun, but I got done off Mrs Wilkinson one time because Michael Lavery had to do PE in his undies and I told her he had poo in them at the back. I was wrong though, because that was just the design of the underpants. Everybody laughed when I said it, but I cried when I realised I was wrong.

We used to go to North Wales on holiday. That was brilliant because they had castles and rock pools and Daddy showed me how to get limpets and to build sand castles while mummy tried to get a tan behind the windbreak. Scarborough was rubbish and so was Blackpool, although I had never been to Scarborough. Blackpool was OK though during the illuminations just after school started again, because you could drive your car along the seafront and have The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Snow White above your head in bright flashing colours. We stayed in Uncle Alvin’s caravan in Blackpool once and I had a bad dream that the miner whose face lit up in the Gold Mine ride was my grandad. I cried because it was really dark and echoey and I was really scared in the Gold Mine, and also my Grandad had died two years before and my Nanna got a dog instead.

I could do a good American accent because that was how they talked in the films and Alias Smith and Jones. They didn’t make films in England. Only in America and another place I couldn’t remember the name of, but I thought that it might have been Peru. The old films were black and white but they were “talkies”, unlike Harold Lloyd on the TV, who was always on in the school holidays. All the new ones were cartoons and they only showed those at the cinema, and you only went to the cinema when Daddy was off work on a Friday. Then they started making films with colour and real people. I knew they did this because Daddy took me to see the very first one ever made: a film called Superman 2. It was brilliant and I wanted to wear my underpants outside my pants but Mummy wouldn’t let me.

We had a dressing-up box in the spare room. It was like a big blue barrel and a quick search of the arm instantly turned us into goodies or baddies. I liked being the sheriff because I was a good boy, but my sister, Rache, was often the baddie/Indian. I had a cap gun and she had a bow and arrow that she didn’t know how to use, so the goodies always won. Plus, I had a faster hobby horse than she did.

I had my own bedroom with an open fireplace that used to make haunting noises at night and sometimes I was scared. I had blue and white baseball pyjamas which always smelled nice. Baseball was a bit like funny cricket. A stupid sport, but I hadn’t seen it. They played it in America. Americans did lots of stupid things.

I used to sit in the corner furthest away from the door next to Tim Tannahill and near the Nature Table. If Mrs Hamer was sitting at her desk working, I could look at her straight on without it looking like I was looking at her. I liked watching her. She was kind and had big glasses.

One Wednesday I was doing my sums in my buff book when Mrs Hamer stood up suddenly and walked to the classroom door. I looked back to my work because it was taking away and I needed to concentrate harder on that than adding up. We had a visitor. I finished my sum and Mummy was standing at the front of the class. Mrs Hamer called me over. My book and pencil lay waiting on the table.

“Come on, son. We’re going on holiday,” Mummy said.
“Now? But I…”
“Yes. Come on. Quickly.”

Mrs Hamer smiled at me and rubbed my hair and I left the room holding mummy’s hand, walked down the corridor and out of the gate to the waiting car, and I never saw Mrs Hamer or Louise Brown ever again.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this story, you will enjoy the following:

This Substack is reader-supported. That means if you find value in what you read here and are in a position to support it, yplease click the purple link below.

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Support is entirely optional — but genuinely appreciated.

By the time Germany had finished with me, I thought I understood life abroad. I had learned that systems mattered, that trust could be built into ordinary life, and that adaptation was mostly a matter of patience, language, and observing how sensible people behaved. I thought that was maturity.

Then I moved to Malaysia.

Malaysia was the final shock. The smells, the heat, the food — magnificent and unapologetic. Nothing in Europe had prepared me for the sensory force of it. Outdoor dining involved a tacit acceptance that rats would be part of the experience. Staff slept on hotel receptions and supermarket checkouts as if exhaustion were simply another part of the working day.

Malaysia’s three main ethnic groups — Malay, Chinese and Indian — lived alongside one another in a state that combined tension, familiarity and routine. Racism was present, often overt, but oddly relaxed and unembarrassed. Banks, restaurants and service workers all appeared to operate by the same principle: listen patiently to the request, nod politely, then ignore it politely.

At first this was incomprehensible. Then, gradually, it became funny. After that, charming.

What I enjoyed least there, however, was not Malaysia but many of my fellow expats. In France and Germany, expatriates had generally seemed politically liberal and mildly interested in integration. In Malaysia, many were British men flashing the cash, eagerly awaiting Brexit, and dreaming of the chance to flex their financial muscle in a newly deregulated Singapore-on-Thames. Malaysia attracted colonial types who viewed locals as children to be patronised or exploited.

The British Empire, I discovered, may have ended, but its foundations and adherents simply relocated.

My own life there was very different. I taught smiling, motivated local children. I learned to communicate, loosely, in my first non-European language. I travelled easily to neighbouring countries that had once seemed unimaginably distant. Whatever quiet sense of European superiority I still possessed quickly began to dissolve.

The world was clearly not arranged around Europe. I realised it never had been.

And then, Istanbul.

To my great surprise, this city — perpetually tugging itself between two continents and two identities — became the place I would spend the longest continuous stretch of my life. Not Paris, not Germany, not some cherished youthful chapter, but here.

I never completely fell in love with Istanbul nor with Turkey. That is the point.

Some countries seduce you. Others employ you.

Istanbul and other large western Turkish cities are superficially Mediterranean and European. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, is everywhere: in classrooms, on walls, in offices, in stories, his signature tattooed on people’s arms. You cannot move without seeing his image or hearing his name. He is revered, as far as I can tell, as a substitute for civic trust.

Daily life required adjustment of a less glamorous sort. Pork had to be worked around. The dolmuş — semi-privatised minibuses tearing through the city while passengers wordlessly pass money hand-to-hand to the driver — are not for the faint-hearted. Offices run on long, unproductive hours, insincere flattery, endless tea and cigarette breaks, and formidable gossip. Wealthy children slept soundly in classrooms, knowing family empires not only awaited them but guaranteed them academic success. Everything in this country is based on relationships.

When we first arrived, Wikipedia and Booking.com were blocked after displeasing the president.

And yet ordinary people could be wonderful. Our local pet-shop owner helped us navigate village life. Shopkeepers solved problems without fuss. Daily routines were threaded with small kindnesses where institutions were lacking.

In some countries the state functions and people withdraw. In others the state falters and people step forward.

Subscribe now

We were paid in US dollars. I learned to keep my mouth shut more often. Turks in the workplace could gossip with a dedication that deserved institutional funding. I also learned to cook better, partly because eating out forever is expensive, and partly because, and I apologise to Turks, restaurant food lacks variety compared to Asia and the ability to experiment is not really a thing here, unlike in Europe. I’ve never eaten anything disgusting in Turkey, but I simply prefer my own cooking.

Turkey was where I stopped expecting a culture to meet me halfway.

The early years abroad are full of judgement. Why do they do this? Why don’t they do that? Why can’t things simply work? With time, the questions become less accusatory and more practical. How does this place function? What matters here? What can be changed? What must simply be accepted?

Travel may broaden the mind. Living abroad does something harder. It dismantles vanity. It strips away the illusion that your habits are neutral or your instincts universal. It teaches when to speak, when to listen, when to judge, and when to stop comparing.

By the end, the world has not become smaller. Your need for it to reassure you has.

And home, once imagined as a single loyal place, becomes layered: childhood streets, borrowed cities, old languages, friendships formed in difficult years, routines acquired by accident.

A citizen of the world, perhaps, but a patriot of nowhere. And that’s just fine with me.

If you enjoyed this piece, you will also enjoy the following pieces on similar themes:

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

Thank you for reading this piece. If you’ve read this far, please subscribe, leave a comment or consider paying a small contribution by clicking the purple button above.

Travel broadens the mind. It’s a cliché, but a comforting and largely uncontroversial one. It suggests that exposure to new places alone is a kind of education: a week here, a long weekend there, a few photographs, a widened horizon. My father is currently on a Caribbean cruise, drifting gently from culture to culture, insulated by buffets, excursions, and the guarantee that nothing too unfamiliar will be required of him. He will return replenished, perhaps with a few observations, certainly with stories. When you travel for leisure, entire populations collapse into two categories: ‘lovely’ or ‘arseholes’, and the lasting memories don’t usually extend beyond the food, the architecture, or how well public transport works.

Living abroad is not travel at all. It is something else entirely. There are still lovely days and arsehole days, but it is a mood-dependent spectrum. Quirks charm you less or go unnoticed; inefficiency bothers you less and, peculiarly, more at the same time. It is less a heady affair full of intoxicating smiles and anticipation, more a marriage attempting to be functional—where passion can fall off a cliff over something as trivial as one of you not liking cats.

Subscribe now

When I was nearly seven, my father took a job in Paris and, without realising it, I left the country that had made me. We moved to La Celle-Saint-Cloud, just outside the city. I had grown up with a garden; suddenly we lived in a flat. Going outside required organisation. Yet everything seemed designed with children in mind: communal play areas, tennis courts, an outdoor swimming pool. Not scraps of leftover land and dilapidated garages to play in, but spaces somebody had planned properly.

Even as a child I sensed something I would only later be able to name: competence.

Food was the real education. Croissants, decent bread, cheese that wasn’t just cheddar, non-incinerated steak. Rotisserie chicken and chips handed over in huge paper bags you’d expect to find charcoal in. School meals with three courses. Rice, pasta, couscous, pizza—entire food groups that simply hadn’t existed in my previous life. Supermarkets were well stocked and attractive, toy shops felt artisanal, and the air seemed permanently scented with coffee and Gitanes. My father’s colleagues indulged me with a warmth that felt both formal and genuine. I didn’t understand France, but I felt looked after by it and, though I wouldn’t articulate this until years later, it had a sophistication that was a world away from the shabbiness of a provincial UK town. I was convinced adult life would be a Ferrero Rocher advert crossed with Emily in Paris.

It took me a long time to adjust inwardly after the Parisian bubble popped. Nobody noticed, but I felt ‘different’ and couldn’t express this for years. At twenty-one, I was lucky enough to take part in the Erasmus European student exchange programme. I selected France and Germany but had no say over which cities. In early autumn I boarded a plane alone for the first time. My destination was the north-west German city of Bremen — my only prior knowledge of which had been the Bremen Town Musicians fairy tale. I was blown away by the UNESCO-listed Rathausplatz, but those first three days were tough and I was grateful to return to the hotel and lock the door each evening.

On day four, Friday, I moved into student lodgings. I celebrated, with the result of a sizeable hangover that made rising before noon unwise. Imagine my shock when I went to the supermarket at 1pm on Saturday to find the doors closed. Imagine learning they wouldn’t open again until Monday morning, and that petrol stations stocked little more than the bare necessities: tow ropes, oil, and beer, crisps, and —for the truly desperate— seedy contact magazines. Time was being regulated in a way I wasn’t used to.

Bremen felt grown up and dominated by an invisible civic bourgeois invigilator. There was no litter, no loud drunks flashing body parts at buses — quite a culture shock compared with a British university town. Merriment existed, but it was quieter, less demonstrative, and oddly more tolerant. Bremen was beautiful and, more importantly, safe. I began to notice that Germans were proud of their culture — not the catastrophic twentieth-century version, but the medieval, mercantile one. Their cities were built on the sites of old market towns, not nearby in apology or avoidance. Tradition mattered.

Trust mattered too. In bars, you didn’t pay until you were leaving; your drinks were tallied up on your beer mat. There was no suspicion of people not paying or of being overcharged. I met students from all over the world and, for the first time, began to understand that ways of thinking were shaped as much by systems as by personality.

People dressed casually but not sloppily; in Britain it had always felt like there was a binary choice between pyjama-clad lethargy and high-octane glamour. I returned that summer and worked for the first time abroad — dodgy tarmacking, then shifts on a production line — and acquired a kind of humility not prevalent among students, especially foreign ones.

Best of all, I was adopted by a pub. I was the youngest regular by a decade; half were Irish expats, half German locals. I joined the football and darts teams. I belonged without having to reinvent myself. It was the first place abroad where I was not merely visiting but participating.

French industrial action delayed my transfer to France by a month, feeling rather like a stay of execution. St Denis, on the northern outskirts of the French capital, shattered the illusion of childhood Paris and ripped up the civilised life I had experimented with in Bremen. I was suddenly one of only a handful of white people in town, hyper-visible and socially irrelevant at the same time. It wasn’t safe to go out after dark. Bars opened at six in the morning and closed at six in the evening. My French, cultivated in the ‘charming’ suburbs of my childhood, simply evaporated. For the first week, I was mute, paralysed by a mixture of fatigue and fear. It was the first time living abroad had left me without words.

St Denis contained a wonderful oasis right on our doorstep: the town’s one bar open in the evening, run by the formidable Danielle and her truck-driver husband, Mateo. This was a place for the displaced, a sanctuary. I remember Régis, the depressed psychiatric nurse whose ex-wife had moved to the other side of the country; Rachid, an atheist Algerian who looked like Lando Calrissian with a shaggy wet-look perm; and Jean-Pierre, flamboyantly gay, wearing a lonely espresso-cup-sized heart on a cord around his neck. All of them, in their own ways, outcasts. Danielle and Mateo held the whole place together like a loving but chaotic family. St Denis was not my happiest time. The area never became safe or cosy, but thirty years on I am still close friends with my two best friends there.

Germany returned later, more seriously. My interview in London for a job in Ingolstadt — the home of Frankenstein and Audi — was bizarrely bilingual; I answered in English to a German speaker, assuming comprehension flowed both ways. My English boss-to-be gently explained that Germany in general, and Bavaria in particular, was a different culture. I nodded without budging internally from my original view that it wasn’t — it simply had better beer, more sausages, and a different language. He was right. I was wrong.

Workplace etiquette was law. Last names created distance. The fruitless search for back bacon became an obsession. Rubbish separation became religion. Ingolstadt was impenitently bourgeois, whereas Bremen had been almost accidentally so. The town at any time was a hornet’s nest of Adabei culture. (‘I war adabei’ in Bavarian translates roughly as “I was there too”), and the ability to boast of attendance at any cultural event was key. So ingrained was this that the local newspaper would even slightly jocularly list the dignitaries and “350 Adabeis” present.

But there, Europe opened up for me. On Fridays after work, I could drive to a host of countries for the weekend. I discovered the music of Herbert Grönemeyer, Juli, Nena, and a little Neue Deutsche Welle. Bavarian food and beer, vastly superior to northern German fare, brought long, convivial nights. I got my first radio gig there, writing news in English — it wasn’t supposed to be comedy, but I made it so, slipping in double entendres that gently mocked Adabei culture. I got to know Turks and Eastern Europeans for the first time. Slowly, my assumption of Western European centrality began to crack.

In Potsdam, something settled in me, even as my first marriage was in its death throes. There was cycling, swimming in lakes, the wonders of Berlin on the doorstep. Conversations with people who spoke calmly about Vor der Wende — before the Wall came down — as lived memory, not ideology. Twice I watched my working life collapse, and twice I learned something unexpected: when things go wrong, the German state is quietly, stubbornly decent. No drama. No heroics. Just functioning institutions and compensation that meant I didn’t get evicted.

By the time Germany had finished with me, I believed I understood how societies worked: trust, order, competence, restraint.

Then I moved to Asia.

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy these other pieces on similar themes:

☕️ Buy Me a Coffee

This Substack is reader-supported. If you genuinely enjoyed this piece and would like to read more like it, please consider paying a small contribution by clicking the purple button above