Mine never went off. Phone was on airplane mode, which I’d like to say was intentional. It wasn’t. I found out in the bar, the glass already warm in my hand, turning the 5G back on and watching the message land two hours late.

You heard a siren and thought of fire. The Mildmay line got cancelled that week for one, a fire in South Acton. Happens in November too. January. July. Fire or no fire, TfL runs the same. Yorkshire had one. So did somewhere close enough to London that the distance didn’t need saying.

Someone at the table had photos. His friend’s, near Yorkshire, the fire going through what he first called the backyard, then, catching himself, the back garden. I’m not American. I don’t know why the correction stayed with me longer than the photos did.

The whole village on standby. Nobody working. Nobody doing much of anything. Too hot to work, too hot to sit still. Everyone a little slow with it, sentences trailing off before the end. The sun up by five and already it’s twenty degrees, and the day just keeps climbing from there, so that by the time you’re meant to be winding down it’s still twenty-nine at ten. You can hear it in the evenings too, extractor units humming out of every other window, everyone running the same machine at the same time, all of it just moving the same hot air from one room to the street and back again. Everyone talking about the cost of air conditioning. For everyone I know who doesn’t have one, the plan is the same, wait until Christmas, when nobody will be buying them and the prices will come down. Except everyone I know has the same plan, so probably nobody’s prices will come down.

In the spirit of everyone having the same idea, we sat for three hours in a sold-out, carpeted theatre and watched a great city burn for reasons that had nothing to do with the weather, then a man spent the rest of the night trying to find his way home. London felt the same, a city under siege by something with no army behind it. So a friend decided, out loud, to leave and go looking for treasure.

It’s the middle of August now. Sleep stopped working around twenty degrees at eleven at night. And tonight, the same schedule that burdened me the past two months kept me awake at one in the morning for the first rain since before June.

Now none of this matters.

A friend of mine read something I wrote out loud to her flatmate. A few minutes in, she started scrolling. Not reading. Scrolling. She said, out loud, to a room I wasn’t in: “Where is the part about resting?”

That sentence changed how I think about writing forever.

THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT YOUR ATTENTION SPAN

You don’t read anymore.

You scan.

You’re not doing this because you’re lazy. You’re doing this because ten thousand headlines trained you to expect the answer in the first three lines, and if it’s not there, your thumb already knows what to do before your brain has caught up.

Efficiency is the new word for laziness.

I didn’t come up with that. Someone smarter than me said it and I’ve thought about it every day since.

WHY HEADINGS EXIST (AND WHY THEY’RE LYING TO YOU)

Here's a heading.

It promises you something.

THE KEY THING NOBODY TELLS YOU

THE ONE MISTAKE THAT'S COSTING YOU EVERYTHING

You've seen a thousand of them. You click, or you scroll, or you skim, because it made you believe the payoff was close.

It wasn't close. It was never close. The heading was the payoff. That's the trick. That's the whole trick.

Quietly, this is what's happening to reading.

I say quietly because that word is doing a lot of work (some heavy lifting) right now and you probably noticed.

A SMALL CONFESSION, BECAUSE HONESTY BUILDS TRUST

I'm messy too, if it helps.

I lose things.

I forget to reply to emails for days and then feel sick about it.

There’s no reasonable distinction in usage between my desk and the dining table.

See how that landed? You felt closer to me for a second there. That’s the part I want you to notice. I didn’t tell you anything about myself, just something true about basically everyone.

Here’s a confession that actually costs something, since I’ve just told you the cheap kind doesn’t count:

I once wrote a whole section about those fancy London toilets where there is no reasonable distinction between the soap and the hand balm. You know the ones. The only way to tell is to pick one at random, hope for the best, and accept that you may have to live with the consequences (albeit, a simple rinse). I used words like anxiety and trial and error, which felt honest enough at the time. Then I realised I wasn’t really describing the bathroom. I was trying to get you on my side. If you recognised yourself in the story, then you might forgive me for not knowing which dispenser was which (or you’re wise enough to check the label first). Better still, you might not notice that I didn’t know either. I had turned not knowing something into a shared experience, and a shared experience into a reason to trust me. That’s the trick I’m accusing everyone else of pulling. Tell the reader something familiar enough that they start forgiving you before you’ve actually said anything worth forgiving.

Nobody tells you the self-aware version of the sin is still the sin. It’s just the sin with a receipt.

THE THING ABOUT AI THAT NOBODY’S HONEST ABOUT

Everyone’s using the same tools now.

The double dashes. The colons where a full stop would do. The word quietly, appearing like a tic, a tell, a magician’s hand landing in the same pocket every single time. You’ve read it a hundred times this month and thought it was insight.

It wasn’t insight.

It was a pattern.

Patterns feel like truth if you’re moving fast enough not to check.

THE PROOF I DIDN’T HAVE TO MAKE UP

Quietly. In a sentence about catching AI writing. I didn't write that joke, I want to be clear, I'm not that good, the platform wrote it about itself, unprompted, presumably without anyone in the building laughing (or worse, with everyone in the building laughing, and shipping it anyway), and I sat there taking a screenshot like a man who's found a fingerprint at the exact scene he'd already decided was the crime.

I felt smug for about four seconds.

Then I remembered what I'm currently doing for a living, which is writing a headed, numbered, self-interrupting essay about how nobody should trust headed, numbered, self-interrupting essays, and the smugness went somewhere quiet to hide.

(I nearly wrote quietly there. I will die on this hill, ideally in a footnote nobody reads).

THE METAPHOR I KEEP SELLING BACK TO MYSELF

A student of mine once said, offhand, mid-lesson, that maybe he was like bread, maybe he rose when he rested.

I put it in a piece. People liked it. A woman I’ve never met messaged me just to say that line made her cry with laughter on a train, which is the kind of sentence you read three times to make sure it’s really about you.

I didn’t earn that line, a teenager did, on a Tuesday, and I took it, dressed it in a paragraph, and let a stranger believe I was the wiser one just for quoting it.

I can feel myself reaching for it again right now, in this very sentence, the way your hand reaches for an infinite scroll you don’t need, and I’m going to leave my hand exactly where it is and not touch it.

WHY I LIVE WHERE I LIVE

I live in a part of London that likes to think of itself as a village, in the way estate agents mean the word rather than the way anyone who's lived in an actual village means it.

There's a newspaper man everyone knows by name.

There's a river you can hear if the traffic's kind.

People say it doesn't feel like the city here and mean it as praise.

I have said this too, to everyone who has visited me here, to people who nodded as though I'd told them something.

I chose it, if I'm honest about it, for the same reason the people I'm mocking in this piece choose their branding and their headline formula and their triads of virtue.

It flattered a version of myself I wanted to believe in.

Authentic.

Rooted.

Not like the others.

Here's the one I haven't made peace with yet, the one I'm not going to dress up as a lesson I've already learned, because I haven't. I used to read purely for the pleasure of it, the way you'd eat something because you were hungry rather than because a nutritionist had cleared it. Lately I notice myself reading the way I've just spent this whole piece accusing other people of writing. Auditing a novel instead of falling into one.

(the way a music graduate at a gig can't just listen… omg).

I don't know yet whether that's the genre's fault for training the habit into me, or my fault for letting the habit follow me home from every other part of my life.

THE PART WHERE I TELL YOU THE TRUTH

Here it is. Are you ready.

It borrowed the shape of good writing the way Covent Garden borrows the shape of culture. Convincing from the front, hollow everywhere you aren’t meant to look. The confession cost nothing. The header was the argument. The truth was promised in the title and never once arrived.

And now I've explained the trick to you, which is another trick, because explaining the trick makes me sound like I've escaped it (the bread joke all over again).

Somebody I used to know, one of those people you just fall out of touch with and never quite know why, told me that I had to read David Foster Wallace, the way you say it about someone when you know something about a person they haven’t caught up to yet. I plowed through nearly everything he wrote. Not just the sentences, the whole posture, the self-deprecation, the refusal to put anyone down even while taking something apart, the sense that a very long sentence could be generous rather than showing off. Then Carver, for the opposite reason, to learn what a sentence can do when it refuses to spend a single word it doesn’t need. Claire Keegan after that.

And now, most days, something that sounds suspiciously like some combination of the three of them comes out of me when I sit down to write, and I’ve just spent this entire piece accusing other people of borrowing a voice. Something like going to a Conservatoire and studying with a teacher for six years and thereafter sounding suspiciously like you were taught by them.

I'd like to tell you it's different, and most days I believe it is. There is a difference between a voice built slowly out of years spent inside other people's sentences and a voice reverse-engineered from a dashboard showing which formula tested well with an audience who'd stopped reading and started scanning. I still think that's true.

But I notice how convenient it is that the version of borrowing I did happens to be the one I get to call taste, and the version they did is the one I get to call theft. I'm not naive enough to think the only thing separating us is the quality of what we borrowed.

I don’t have a clean way to end this, and I’m not about to manufacture one. This essay was going to end with a line about permission or courage (…as if) or reading with your whole chest, maybe something with a colon in it, and I deleted it, because the honest ending is that I’m not sure what happens to a sentence once it stops needing to sell you anything (except this one is still asking you to subscribe, still hoping you’ll share it, ((maybe even read it without asking to be promised anything)) still borrowing a fourteen-year-old’s line about bread if I’m not careful, still living in a postcode I picked to feel like someone I’m not sure I am. Still doing some version of what it’s just spent nine headings accusing everyone else of doing, which is perhaps why I don’t have anything better to say about it than that).

So I’ll leave it here, going on a little longer than it should, without quite arriving anywhere.

Anyway, you’re still here.

I don’t normally find myself in the City at eight in the morning, which is probably why it hit me the way it did. I’d just dropped my girlfriend off near Liverpool Street, one of those slightly aimless post-goodbye moments where you’re not quite ready to go home but you don’t have anywhere to be, and all I really wanted was coffee. What I got instead was a front-row seat to the Monday morning performance, which, if you’ve never witnessed it at commuter hour in Spitalfields, is a religious procession being conducted under severe time pressure.

The first thing you notice is the shoes (or at least the first thing I noticed, which probably says as much about me as it does about the people wearing them). Not the shoes themselves (which are fine, I’m sure. Expensive, probably. Leather, certainly.) but the sound of them, this urgent little clip-clop on the pavement that I eventually realised was exactly the sound I’d heard a day earlier when I was walking through a prep school corridor in Bushey, which is to say the sound of a Shetland pony that’s running slightly late for something. Then the rucksacks, hanging absurdly low, exactly the way boys wear them in school before they’ve worked out that tightening the straps is both possible and free. I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between the private-school boys I was about to teach and the private-school boys who were about to go and bank.

I found a coffee place. It had an entrance door and an exit door, which I mention only because I learned this the hard way, having finished my coffee on the street and walked back in through the exit to return the cup to the man at the counter (because I was raised to say thank you, and because, as far as I knew, doors remained stubbornly two-directional.) At which point I received a series of salaried stares so hostile and so perfectly synchronised that you’d think I’d walked into the place holding something dangerous. There was no signage. No arrows. No indication whatsoever that this particular door was reserved exclusively for outgoing traffic. Everyone just knew. Everyone except me.

I was now the man going the wrong way, holding a used cup, committing the unforgivable sin of disrupting their flow — and that was before anyone had clocked in at 9am.

And I'd been on the phone, moments before, to an old friend from back home, which meant I'd forgotten to switch my voice over, because the soft Scottish vowels that got me through over twenty years in Scotland have a habit of causing polite and quiet chaos south of Watford, and so when I asked the barista for a glass of water what actually came out was can I get a wee cup of tap water, and the room went silent. Whether the whole room went quiet or only the people nearest me I'll never know, because once you've accidentally said wee in Spitalfields your perception becomes unreliable. So anyway, I said wee. In Spitalfields. At eight in the morning.

And someone giggled at me. Not at the wrong door or the stares but at the wee, just a small involuntary laugh from somewhere in the queue, which was the first genuinely spontaneous sound I heard in that coffee shop all morning. Better to be the man going the wrong way through an unmarked door, I decided, which is a very generous thing to think when you’re the man who has just gone the wrong way through an unmarked door.

Because that's the other thing. There was a wee man in front of me in the queue (rucksack at half-mast, shoes doing their little pony routine) who ordered an Americano, and the barista, who was perfectly friendly, said would you like to try our filter, and the man said no, no, I had the filter last time (last time being, presumably, yesterday), …mixing things up today he said. As if he had just done something daring, as if the decision to move from one extraction method of coffee to a slightly different extraction method of coffee constituted an act of spontaneity in an otherwise carefully tailored (in the literal sense) life. Mixing things up today. This man's entire experience of variety, of going off-script, was an Americano.

Of course this is rich coming from someone who owns three different brewing devices and has, on more than one occasion, explained burr grinders to all my five friends. And I was the odd one. Among people who say things like mixing it up today.

There was a group nearby. I think they worked together, or at least they performed the body language of people who worked together, which in London is its own dialect, asking each other about the weekend. Which turned out to be a competitive recounting of how much they'd all had to drink, delivered with pride. The vibes were unreal, one of them said, which I hadn't realised people actually said out loud, although this may say more about the circles I move in than about society generally, and I stood there with my wee cup of tap water and my wrong-door shame thinking that these people spend five days compressed into the clip-clop commute and the exit-door compliance and the filter-to-Americano daring, and then they spend two days trying to prove to each other that the compression lifted, and then they come back on Monday and perform it to each other as proof of a life well lived.

The vibes were unreal. Which is to say: the vibes were all they had. I say this as someone who has spent entire afternoons blinking at walls and pretending this is different.

I made it home, slowly, through no particular route. The sound of my neighbour's TV bleeding through that same wall at 9.30am, which I assume is normal for people who work from home? I sat in the house with my filter coffee, because apparently I am not as different from the Americano man as I'd like to believe, and stared at that wall for what might have been an hour, and it was the best part of my day, and I didn't mix anything up at all.

I tell people this. That my favourite part of the day is staring at the wall first thing in the morning. I say it with a little laugh, a slight ironic lift, so they don't think I'm being serious, because if I said it straight they'd worry about me, or pity me, or start recommending podcasts. But I mean it. Sometimes I'll look outside and stare at the grass instead, but the grass can be rather distracting. You end up watching things instead, which is altogether a different activity. The wall has no motion. The wall is a blank slate. A literal one, unfortunately. It's just there, being a wall. And you're just there, being nothing in particular.

Peter Gibbons wanted to do nothing. Not die. Not become rich. Just be left alone. In Office Space, he says: “Ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it.” It’s played as a joke. It isn’t one.

What Peter does next is the part the film gets remembered for. He simply stops going to work. And then, almost as an afterthought, he decides he might stop paying bills too. The logic isn’t laziness so much as curiosity. If one rule turns out to be optional, perhaps the others are as well.

The strange thing about Office Space is what happens next. Peter tells the truth to two consultants brought in to “downsize” the company (the Americano-man equivalent of “mixing things up” on the staff roster). He does about fifteen minutes of real work a week. He has eight different bosses. He doesn’t care. The consultants hear this and conclude that he is “a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” They promote him. The people who actually do the work get fired.

The system cannot tell the difference between not caring and confidence. This is where the joke stops being a joke. This is the Spitalfields coffee queue. The Americano man cares deeply. Just about very specific things. The group care deeply about the vibes at the weekend. I care about walls, mostly, apparently. The performance has been internalised so thoroughly that a slightly different coffee feels like freedom. And the system rewards it. Not with a promotion, necessarily, but with the comfort of fitting in, of going through the right door, of having vibes that are, presumably, unreal. Meanwhile the man who says “wee” gets stared at because he has accidentally revealed he doesn’t quite know the rules everyone else has illicitly agreed upon.

Peter’s neighbour, Lawrence, asks him what he’d do if he had a million dollars.

“Nothing,” Peter says. “I’d relax. I’d sit on my ass all day.”

Lawrence shrugs. “Well, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin. He’s broke, don’t do shit.”

He’s right. And he’s wrong. You don’t need a million dollars. But you do need enough. Enough for the nothing to be a choice rather than a crisis. Peter Gibbons on his sofa and a man who’s just been made redundant on his sofa look identical from the outside. One of them is free. The other is falling. The amount of money that separates the two isn’t a million dollars. But it isn’t nothing either. (For the avoidance of doubt, I am not Lawrence’s cousin. I still have direct debits.)

There’s a deleted ending to Office Space that most people haven’t seen. Peter escapes the office and takes a construction job. He’s outside. He seems happy. Then someone tells him to stop talking and get back to work. The boss changed. The instruction didn’t.

I understood Peter because I’d spent years trying to become the opposite of him.

I had an answer. I'd play guitar. I'd practise. I'd sit in a room and work through something slow and difficult and beautiful until the light changed outside. My careers counsellor had never heard of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. When I said it was in Glasgow, they asked if it was Glasgow City College. When I left school, I was marked down as a concern for not entering further education or employment. They kept calling well into my second year of undergraduate.

And I did exactly that. I followed the answer all the way to a conservatoire in Scotland, and the conservatoire taught me that the thing I loved was now a job, and the job required survival, and survival looked like over-practising and accepting every gig I was offered and being grateful, always grateful, because someone somewhere had it worse and at least I wasn't in a cubicle. Or gallantly over-drinking at the weekend (or I at least did, and did not do so gallantly). The guidance counsellor's question is a trap either way. If you don't have an answer, you're aimless. If you do, you turn the thing you love into work, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to claw back the version of it that was free.

I moved to London because that’s where the work was, and for two years I did what every freelance musician does when they arrive in a city that costs twice what they earn: I said yes to everything. Schools across three boroughs. Private students squeezed into gaps. Gigs I didn’t want but couldn’t afford to turn down. I built a teaching network the only way you can: by being available, being reliable, and never once suggesting that your time might be worth more than whatever they’d decided to pay you. The schedule filled. The income climbed. And for a while I mistook the climbing for progress, because that’s what progress looks like from inside whatever spreadsheet cell the SUMIF formula appears under. I started thinking of myself as a serious earner. I started thinking in terms of revenue.

Then HMRC sent me a letter telling me I now qualified for Making Tax Digital. More returns. More spreadsheets. More hours spent accounting for the hours I’d already spent. I sat looking at the quarterly return and realised it accounted for output, but had no column for the cost to the person producing it.

I’d spent years trying to find work that didn’t feel like work. Then I found it and immediately started treating it like work.

The teaching, which I loved, had become something I did too much of, which turns out to be the precise mechanism by which a vocation becomes a commute. More students meant more travel. More travel meant more dead hours on trains. London is a machine for converting free time into rent, and I had become very efficient at feeding it.

The sign on the wall at Initech (Office Space) says Is This Good For The Company? Nobody put a sign on my wall. I didn’t need one. I’d internalised it so completely that every hour was filtered through whether it was productive, whether it was earning, whether it was good for the business—which was me.

The question had become: Is this good for the business of being me?

It’s a question that should never be asked about a life. But I was asking it every time I looked at my diary and saw a gap. Idleness had become something I felt obliged to justify.

At the very least I ought to have a kitchen chalkboard that asks Is This Good For You? I saw a fridge magnet with exactly that once. Which is how you know the problem has reached the kitchen.

So I started cutting. Slowly, the way you remove load-bearing walls when you're not entirely sure the ceiling won't come down. Fewer school days. More private students, which I could teach from my living room in my own clothes at my own pace without the commute or the corridor or the clip-clop. I started saying no to things, which is a skill that nobody at the conservatoire teaches you because the conservatoire teaches you to say yes, be grateful, take the gig.

Mondays and Tuesdays I'm on the Lioness line. Off-peak, the carriage mostly empty. There is always at least one person on speakerphone, the recipient's voice carrying down the train at a volume that suggests the meeting is going badly or the connection is poor or both. The Lioness line is not your personal office space. I have never said this aloud. They keep talking. I look out the window. The train moves anyway.

Teaching doesn’t always feel like work. There's no friction in it. I'm in my living room, with my guitar, doing the thing I told the guidance counsellor I'd do, and someone is paying me to do it, and when they leave I make a filter coffee and sit with it and sometimes I don't move for an hour. This is the redesign. This is the thing I spent two years buying. It looks, from the outside, like very little. From the inside it feels like the first honest arrangement I've ever made with my own time.

What the idleness gave me, eventually, was a different way of counting. Not money in but energy out. Whether a new student or a new gig was worth it stopped being purely a financial question and started becoming a question of what it actually took from me. Not just the hour itself, but the tiredness before it, the travel after it, the shape of the day wrapped around it.

I turned thirty, which I mention not for sympathy but because it is the age at which you finally have permission to admit that your energy is finite, and there are costs no quarterly return was ever designed to measure. The return accounts for output. It has no column for the person producing it.

A student of mine came back after the Easter break having done no practice whatsoever. I know this because he told me, cheerfully, without guilt, in the way that only a child can admit to total negligence. And then he played, and he was better. Noticeably, undeniably better. The stiffness was gone. The passages that had been forced were now easy. Something had happened in the weeks he spent doing nothing, some quiet consolidation that only the space between practice could have produced.

Maybe I’m like bread, sir, he said. I rise when I rest.

I think about that line more than I should. Because it's the thing I've been trying to argue for this entire essay, except a fourteen-year-old said it better than I ever could, without having read any theory about it, without knowing who Cal Newport is, without having spent a single morning staring at a wall and calling it a lifestyle. He just didn't practise. And he got better. Something happened in the gap. The something came out of the nothing.

And yet even saying this feels like a betrayal of the argument, because the moment you justify idleness by pointing to what it produces, you've turned the wall into a desk and the nothing into a strategy. You're right back where you started.

Last week I sat down to build my calendar for the coming days and felt a familiar tightening in my shoulders. The gaps were gone. I’d filled them. Not with schools or commutes, but with other things: useful things, productive things, things I’d chosen freely and genuinely wanted to do, but which had somehow expanded to fill every available hour until the schedule looked exactly like the schedule I’d spent two years escaping. The redesign was complete. The wall was still white. And I had no time to look at it.

The thing nobody tells you about self-employment is that there is no clocking out. An employee leaves the building and the day ends. Then, presumably, the vibes begin. You never leave the building because you are the building. The low, persistent suspicion that you ought to be doing something better than whatever you’re currently doing is always available. There is no manager to resent. There is no system to blame. There is only you, and the calendar, and the question of whether this hour is justified.

The strangest part of all of this is what the calendar looks like now. Two full days in school. Private students across the week. Space to read, to write, to practise, to think. The gigs I actually want to do. It looks, almost exactly, like the calendar I had in Glasgow before I moved to London. Before the scaling and the networks and the quarterly returns. I walked the dog a lot back then. I didn’t have much money but I was, I think, more comfortable. I look back on it as a good time.

I moved to one of the most expensive cities in the world, spent two years building a life I eventually realised I needed to dismantle, and arrived somewhere that looks remarkably like where I started.

The detour taught me one thing. The question of whether this hour is justified is not one worth spending your life trying to answer. The suspicion will always be available. The wall will always be white.

Let the bread rise.

Five euros and a shrug. Welcome to Venice.

I had never been to a major tourist destination before. I was apprehensive. I’ve experienced Edinburgh during the Fringe, and I know what that does to a city. But Edinburgh gets one month of it a year. One month where the streets are unwalkable and every second building is a venue or a pop-up bar, and then it’s over: a month-long hangover in September before the city goes back to being a city again. Venice is like this all the time now. I wanted to experience one of the greatest cities on earth, and I wasn’t sure what that would actually feel like from the inside.

The first thing you see leaving Santa Lucia is water. Which sounds romantic until you notice the queue for the vaporetto, the lads in matching t-shirts already three Peronis deep, and a woman taking a panoramic video of the Grand Canal whilst slowly reversing into someone’s luggage. This is approximately 11am.

Within ten minutes of arriving, Celia and I stopped at a bar for a drink and a snack. We were immediately swarmed by a stag do. Or a hen do. Or both. I never worked out which. Venice, a city built on water, slowly sinking into the Adriatic, now apparently the destination of choice for Italian Dave’s last weekend of freedom.

I should say at this point that I had a guide. Celia lived in Venice for a year. She knows the streets, knows the bars, knows which cicchetti to order and where to eat squid ink spaghetti without paying thirty euros for the privilege of sitting near a canal. This is an enormous advantage and I want to be upfront about it, because everything that follows is coloured by the fact that I did not experience Venice the way most tourists experience Venice. I experienced it from slightly above, peering down, which is its own kind of problem.

The Venice Duck Store is a shop that sells rubber ducks dressed as Venetian things. Gondolier ducks. Carnival ducks. Murano glass ducks. I saw this shop three times within what felt like a two-minute walk. Three separate branches of a rubber duck shop, on an island you can cross in an hour. That is the economy of Venice now. Not glass-blowing, not boat-building. Rubber ducks.

The souvenir shops are extraordinary in their density. Fridge magnets, Venetian masks made of plastic, badges, flags, those little ceramic tiles with your name on them. Every second shopfront seemed to sell the same twelve objects in a slightly different arrangement. On the Rialto Bridge, one of those places that paints a miniature portrait of your eye. I’ve seen the same shop in Paris. I’ve seen it in Porto. I’ve seen it in Granada. I’ve seen it in Covent Garden. The tourist economy isn’t even local anymore. It’s a franchise, the same twelve businesses replicated across every European city, selling the experience of somewhere specific whilst feeling entirely generic. I tried to find a shop selling actual local produce. Food, wine, something a Venetian might buy for their kitchen. It took genuine effort. The city has reorganised itself around the people passing through it, not the people living in it. Which is hard to do when the people living in it have largely left.

There is now an entire economy on Instagram designed to help tourists avoid tourist traps. Don’t eat near the main attractions. Avoid the laminated menus. Don’t go anywhere with a server standing outside trying to lure you in. The night before we arrived, I watched one of these videos myself. The next day, I overheard a man explaining to his companion, “I don’t tend to go for the ones with the waiters standing outside, you know.” Everyone performing knowingness they borrowed from a screen the night before. Meanwhile, I’m following my girlfriend, who is my guide. Adjusting aperture settings along the way.

I ended up eating at a place with a server standing outside. It was more than fine. Southern Europe invented al fresco dining. A man at a door is not a scam. It’s a restaurant.

The original architecture is disappearing behind the infrastructure built to manage the people who came to see it. Handrails, concrete reinforcements, safety barriers, tourist signage. The thing built to protect the thing slowly replaces the thing itself.

And then the gondolas. A hundred euros for a ride. I watched the queues from a bridge, couples shuffling forward in a line that looked exactly like the queue for Oblivion at Alton Towers. The gondolier in his stripes, the phone held up to record the moment, the four minutes of footage that will sit in a camera roll forever and get watched once. This is not a mode of transport. It hasn’t been for a long time. It’s a fairground ride with better scenery and a man in a hat.

Every bridge is a photoshoot. People queue along one side waiting their turn to pose, while the people actually trying to get somewhere are squeezed into the centre, threading through the production. The bridges are narrow. They were built for foot traffic, not for content. Venice has physically restructured itself to bear the weight of people photographing it (including me and my Fujifilm X-Pro 2 set to custom film emulation settings). That is not a metaphor. That is civil engineering.

The best time to experience Venice is at night. After eight o’clock, the city empties. The day-trippers leave, the cruise passengers are back on board, and suddenly you can hear your own footsteps on the stone. It becomes clear very quickly that the majority of visitors do not stay overnight. They arrive, they photograph, they queue for a gondola, and they leave. If you have saved your money and spent it on a bed in the city rather than a day return, the Venice you get after dark is a different place entirely.

Earlier that day, Celia was on the phone to her dad, who was asking what I thought of Venice so far. She asked me herself. “Ti piace?” Do you like it? (”Ti piace” is a special kind of Italian conversational cuddle.) I remember saying I didn’t know yet. I hadn’t really had the time or the space to take it in. There was too much in the way.

And then, at night, standing next to the water in the quiet, listening to waves against the stone, seeing the buildings and bridges empty in dark alleyways, I finally understood what kind of place this is. By seven the next morning, it was gone again.

On our last night, we left an osteria at half ten and I thought the city had finally gone to sleep. We turned the corner onto a main street and found everyone queuing for ice cream.

It also became clear, based on the pace of foot traffic during the day, that many visitors had arrived slightly unprepared for Venice as a physical concept. Venice is small and entirely walkable, but most tourists will not venture as far as the Arsenale or the Biennale grounds unless they take the vaporetto. Nine fifty per trip for tourists. One fifty for residents. The city runs a two-tier public transport system, and the tier you’re on depends entirely on whether you live here or are visiting.

We have all heard stories of Americans training to walk before a European holiday. I had assumed this was a joke. I watched people buying trainers and ballet flats from street vendors and changing into them on the spot, having apparently arrived in Venice without fully accounting for the possibility of walking.

We ate well. Cicchetti and spritz at bars where you stand at the counter and point at things behind glass. Octopus. Black squid spaghetti. For the price of a pint in Richmond you can get two espressos, mini cornetti and a tart for breakfast. This is the Venice that exists if you know someone, or if you’re willing to get properly lost, or if you can ask for a table in Italian and mean it. I have spent months with an Italian book, Duolingo and a Sardinian girlfriend. I can ask for a table. I can ask where the toilet is. I can order a basic meal and understand what day of the week it is. It’s not fluency. But it’s an attempt, and I was amazed by how many people made no attempt at all. English, spoken loudly, at everyone, as if volume were a universal translator.

Celia pointed out Ca’ Dario from the canal. A fifteenth-century palazzo, beautiful in the way everything in Venice is beautiful, whose owners keep ending up bankrupt or dead. A diamond merchant who went bust. A tenor involved in a serious accident during negotiations to buy the place. An owner murdered by his lover in 1970. Raul Gardini, who said he wasn’t afraid of the curse, dead by suicide in 1993.

It is currently back on the market, listed with two estate agents because one apparently wasn’t enough, at a price described only as “on request.” It was previously listed at eighteen million euros. Nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a Moorish fountain in the garden, and a body count that would concern most surveyors.

Venice is full of stories like this if you know who to ask. It has drawn artists and writers for centuries, people who came for the light and the water and the strangeness of a city that shouldn’t exist. Now it draws people who will walk past Ca’ Dario, photograph it because it’s pretty, and never know a thing about it. The Duck Store is visible from the street. The curse is not.

One evening we were finishing dinner at a small place that closed at ten. The food was excellent and the street was quiet, the kind of restaurant where you feel like you’ve been let in on something. At quarter past ten, an American couple appeared at the door. They wanted a table. The owner explained, politely, that the kitchen was closed. They were serving the last of the diners already seated, and that was it.

The man tried to negotiate. Just something small, he said. Quick meal. No trouble. The owner said no. They were closed.

His wife stood at the door behind him. I could hear her clearly from our table. “Just show them the money,” she said. “Throw money at them. Just give them what they want.”

Her husband shushed her. He went back to the owner, who told him there were plenty of places still open on the main street around the corner. Which was true.

The man relayed this to his wife. “That’s what two other places have told us,” she said. “They must be crooks.”

I want to sit with that for a moment. A restaurant closes at ten. It declines to serve you at quarter past. And the conclusion is not that the restaurant is closed, but that the locals are running some kind of scam. The money should have worked. The money always works. And when it doesn’t, the city must be broken. That, or they failed to make the font big enough on their opening hours on the door she stood next to.

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I took a lot of photographs in Venice. I have a Fujifilm camera and I like street photography. I like the way a camera makes me look more carefully at things, slows me down, forces me to notice composition and light and the strange things people do. In Venice, everyone is watching. Everyone is being watched. Everyone is holding a camera.

I watched a man hurrying down one of the busiest streets holding what looked like a stick with a tiny camera on the end of it. Not a selfie stick with a phone. Just a stick. His arm was rigid, held out in front of him at full length, filming everything as he marched forward. His wife was beside him, keeping pace. I turned to Celia and asked what the footage was for. Were they going to sit down in front of the telly next week with a bag of popcorn and watch the whole thing back?

I photographed tourists. A woman in a tiered gown posed against a dark archway near St Mark’s, dressed for a photoshoot in a city she was visiting for three days. A man sitting alone on a wooden dock, a Lacoste bag at his feet, a gondola sliding past behind him. He probably thought he was having a quiet moment. I photographed him having it.

I uploaded several of these to Instagram. I sent some to my parents. Look how cool this place is, I (illicitly) said. I’m in Venice.

There’s a popular genre of Instagram reel that shows tourists behaving badly. Swimming in fountains, climbing over barriers, yelling at waiters. Millions of views. The comments are always the same. How could anyone be so disrespectful. I would never. These people are ruining it for the rest of us.

The reel itself, of course, is tourist content. Filmed by tourists, consumed by tourists, sustained by the shared conviction that other tourists are the problem.

Everyone draws the line just below their own behaviour. The person with the selfie stick looks down on the person with the matching tour group lanyard. The person with the lanyard looks down on the cruise ship passengers who get four hours onshore. I look down on all of them because I have a Fujifilm and a phrasebook and a girlfriend who used to live here. I’m not a tourist. I’m a traveller. I’m not taking selfies. I’m practising street photography. Daniel Arnold walks the streets of New York with a camera and it’s art. I walk the streets of Venice with a camera and it’s the same thing, right (vero?)

It isn’t, of course. Or maybe it is. I’m not sure the distinction matters as much as I’d like it to. Without Celia, I might have been on the main street eating overpriced pasta near a fridge magnet. I might have been closer to that American couple than I’d care to admit. Not shouting about money at a closed restaurant, no. But standing in the same city, expecting it to perform for me in exchange for five euros and my time.

Venice is sinking. You probably know this. The population has dropped from over a hundred thousand to somewhere around fifty thousand permanent residents, maybe fewer. The rest is us. The people passing through, with our cameras and our gondola tickets and our QR codes, consuming the place faster than the Adriatic.

It is a beautiful city. The Grand Canal at golden hour is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen. The light on the water, the palazzos, the improbable fact of a city built on wooden stilts in a lagoon. It earns its reputation. That’s what makes the rest of it so hard to watch. Everyone should get to see this place. I just don’t know where you draw the line between letting people experience one of the greatest cities on earth and watching them love it to death.

I came for the Biennale. That was my reason. An international art exhibition held in a city that has itself become an exhibition. I walked through pavilions of contemporary art and then stepped outside into streets where the main creative act was the production of content. Everyone performing Venice for an audience that wasn’t there.

Dov’è il bagno. As if that changes anything

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A bus, formatted as a train.

St Andrews is one of the oldest universities in the world. It is where Prince William met Kate Middleton, if that means anything to you. It is a global destination for golf. It is one of the most visited towns in Scotland. It does not have a railway station.

The St Andrews branch line closed in January 1969. It had run the five miles from Leuchars directly into the town. Richard Beeching, a chemist who had been brought in to run British Railways on a profit-and-loss basis, recommended in his 1963 report that the line be cut. The line was not profitable, and so the line closed. Fifty-eight years later, I was standing on a platform at Leuchars around eight in the morning, waiting for the replacement service that had now been running for half a century.

Beeching was not asked whether people could get from Glasgow to St Andrews. He was asked to make the railways turn a profit. These are different questions, and the report proceeded as though they were the same one.

My father grew up in Glenrothes, eleven miles from St Andrews. Glenrothes is a post-war new town, designated in 1948 and built to house workers for the Rothes Colliery. The colliery flooded before it properly opened. The town was built around an industry that never materialised, and then denied the railway station it had been promised. Proposals came over the years. The station did not.

My father, looking around Glenrothes in the mid 1970s and not finding much of a future there, joined the Royal Engineers. He wanted a trade, a skill, something concrete to build a life around. He met my mother, they had children. The family eventually moved back to Scotland, and I grew up there.

The irony I find genuinely funny, in the very narrow sense that some things eventually pass beyond tragedy into comedy, is this. I would not exist had Glenrothes offered my father anything worth staying for. The structural failure of a post-war new town, a flooded colliery, and a cancelled railway station combined, through a sequence of events too long and probably too dull to fully trace here, eventually resulted in me. And then, four decades later, I arrived in the same county, at the same absence, rerouted through the 99 bus and a five o’clock alarm

I had taken a job at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews in September 2021. It was my first guitar teaching post, which felt significant in the way first things do. I had thirty-two students by the end of the first term. I am telling you the number because it becomes relevant. Teaching in St Andrews whilst living in Glasgow required leaving the flat before five on Mondays and Tuesdays, catching the first train to Edinburgh, changing at Leuchars, then having nine minutes to find the 99 bus. It was never entirely clear whether the nine minutes existed as description or aspiration.

I should say that the first term involved meeting my students through face masks and then, three months later, seeing their faces for the first time. This is a strange way to build a pedagogical relationship (especially your first). The connections still formed. The commute did not get shorter.

A year in, I took a second post at Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow, which finally allowed me to afford living alone in the city again. That had always been the plan. The two jobs together made the plan financially viable, which turned out to be a different thing from making the week physiologically viable. Mondays and Tuesdays in St Andrews. Wednesdays and Thursdays in Glasgow. The kind of pace required to justify the mileage. By Thursday evening I was in bed by eight. The thirty-two students at St Leonard’s, and what I had built there, were not getting the week they deserved.

I left St Leonard’s after two years, which felt like abandoning something real. I moved all my work to Glasgow and tried to build a private teaching studio there. The rate achievable in Glasgow, forty pounds an hour on a good day with the right client in the right postcode, was not making the months add up. The arts infrastructure that had once made Glasgow seem like the obvious place to live was closing one venue at a time. I have written about this elsewhere. The concerts were fewer. The rooms were emptying. I moved to London.

Transport for London, as any Londoner will explain to you (the same way talking about the weather is now UK common-tongue) and with genuine feeling, is in a state of permanent crisis. The fares are high. The delays are frequent and treated as matters of acute personal distress. I have lived in London long enough to understand this perspective, and still find it difficult to keep a neutral expression when I watch a grown man in £600 brogues on a Northern line platform begin audibly despairing because the next train is now an entire minute away.

A colleague told me recently that it was crazy I have to wait thirty minutes for the train home from Waterloo. This is true, the wait between trains is sometimes thirty minutes, and I understand that from the outside this sounds like a long time. From where I am standing, which is a platform that exists and a train that comes, it sounds like a Tuesday.

Richard Beeching applied a profit-and-loss framework to a rail network in 1963. The St Andrews branch closed in 1969. My father left Glenrothes not long after and met my mother, and had me.

Thirty-odd years later, the consequences were standing at Leuchars before dawn with thirty-two guitar lessons ahead and nine minutes to find a bus.

None of this appeared in the report because none of this was meant to.

St Pancras got a train station out of it. The frost got this week.

London has decided to fill the time by hosting two separate marches and a football match.

It’s fifteen degrees and the colour of a headache. Three separate crowds are heading into central London. The Met Police have announced road closures, diversions, and the kind of language you use when you want people to know you’re taking it seriously without admitting you’re nervous. The only group not angry about something is heading to Wembley. By the end of it, one group will be.

Chelsea and Manchester City are playing the FA Cup final. Chelsea haven’t won it since 2018. City are in their fourth consecutive final, which nobody has ever done before, and they have Haaland, who has somehow never scored at Wembley, which means he still probably won’t today because football statistics only exist to tempt fate. Ninety thousand people have paid for the right to care about something straight-forward for a few hours. Two teams. One trophy. The band of the Household Cavalry will play Abide With Me. A choir of Bradford City fans called the Bantam of the Opera will sing the national anthem. I didn’t make that up.

Meanwhile, Tommy Robinson’s “Unite The Kingdom” march is assembling from 10am. The Home Secretary has banned at least seven far-right figures from entering the country, including a Dutch influencer, a Polish MEP, and a Flemish politician, on the grounds that their presence is “not conducive to public good.” The phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting this week, after Labour spent most of it losing council seats, cabinet ministers, and whatever atmosphere of competence remained.

Last year’s rally drew over a hundred thousand people and featured a video address from Elon Musk, which now feels less surprising than it should. A member of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative has reportedly encouraged marchers online to confront Jews, threaten LGBTQ+ people, and perform Nazi salutes, which apparently still falls under peaceful public concern provided everyone calls it patriotism afterwards.

From midday, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is marching for Nakba Day. Exhibition Road to Pall Mall. Seventy-eight years since the displacement began, and the march routes are now so well-established they could probably run themselves. Coaches are coming from Bath, Birmingham, Cardiff, Cambridge, Colchester, Carmarthen, Coventry, Darlington. Entire Saturdays handed over to diesel, service stations, and morally justified exhaustion.

Three crowds. Three reasons. The football fans are the only ones who will know by five o’clock whether the day was worth it.

The Robinson march believes immigrants are the reason the country feels broken. The Palestine march believes the country is complicit in breaking someone else’s. These are not the same argument, however much they occasionally share a postcode. One is about who we let in. The other is about what we send out.

The common ground, if you can call it that, is the sense that something is wrong and someone visible should probably pay for it. Visible targets are easier to reach than whatever is actually happening to the country.

I am watching all of this from my phone, in Richmond, where the closest thing to political unrest is a passive-aggressive customer after receiving their pint in a plastic cup. The trains into Waterloo are running, but Transport for London suggests allowing extra time, which is what TfL always suggests, as if the solution to every structural problem in the country is leaving the house ten minutes earlier. I could go out. I won’t. Something viral is on its way in (or out) but hasn’t quite surfaced, that strange fatigue where the body has made a decision the mind hasn’t confirmed yet. I’ll probably check the score instead.

The Ice Saints are supposed to mark the end of the cold. The tradition says that after this the ground warms, the growing season begins, the danger passes. The Swiss meteorological service checked the historical data and found no statistical basis for the claim. The cold doesn’t know what day it is. It comes when it comes.

Fifteen degrees. Mostly cloudy. Four thousand police officers. One trophy. The frost hasn’t cleared yet.

This is not an unusual story. Every musician I know has a version of it, and most of them tell it with the same mixture of disgust and resignation, like describing a learned weather system. What matters is not that it happened, but what it tells you about who is now deciding what gets recorded, performed, and heard.

Every generation of musician has had to do things other than play. There have always been grant applications, networking drinks, uncomfortable phone calls to promoters, bio headshots taken against exposed brick. If this were just a complaint about having to do marketing on top of practising, you would be right to stop reading here.

I did not grow up dreaming of making the perfect carousel (I had to pause just now to remember what they are called), but nor did anyone grow up dreaming of writing Arts Council applications, and we managed.

What is different, and worth taking seriously, is that this particular form of non-art labour no longer stays separate from the art. The grant application existed in a different room from the concert hall. You typed it at your desk, clicked send, and then walked on stage and played. The two activities occupied different parts of your life, different faculties, and an entirely different cognitive apparatus. (A separation I now try to maintain artificially: my calendar is colour-coded, purple for practice, red for admin. The categorisation feels both faintly ridiculous and entirely necessary.)

Instagram is not like that. Instagram bleeds.

I notice it most in live performance. There is a particular kind of smile that has migrated from the platform to the stage. A soft, knowing, camera-ready expression that certain players now wear during concerts. The strange thing is that there is no camera. The audience is right there, in the room, but the performer is playing to an imagined lens, addressing an absent algorithm with a face designed for a vertical screen.

If you have seen it, you know what I mean, the peculiar unease it produces. A kind of uncanny valley of live performance, where the human on stage is behaving like a rendering of themselves. You are watching someone perform the act of performing. Debord called this the spectacle: the moment when lived experience is replaced by its representation. He had not yet seen Instagram, but he had the gist.

It changes how you watch. When enough performances are optimised for engagement, you start watching all performances with suspicion. Was that pause a musical choice, or a moment designed to look good in a reel? Is that expression felt or manufactured?

The instrumental smile, warm but not actually warm, does more than spoil the moment. Over time, it erodes your capacity for trust. You start raising your defences against the genuine thing too. Every performance becomes potentially fraudulent, and the musicians who are playing with real sincerity get caught in the blast radius.

When Instagram doesn’t stay in its box, it stops being marketing. It starts shaping the performance, and then how you watch everything else. We call that contamination.

And the institutions are making it worse, or at least making it permanent. Everyone is scrambling to adapt. What I see, looking at classical guitar in Britain, is a small number of gatekeepers, record labels, broadcasters, festival programmers, converging on a single model of what a viable musician looks like.

Young, photogenic, prolific online, and playing familiar repertoire. The same Debussy, the same Rodrigo, the same Albéniz, cycling through the same rotation Classic FM has run for decades, now reinforced rather than disrupted by the algorithm, which rewards familiarity just as reliably.

The label signs the musician with the followers. The broadcaster promotes the musician with the label, the followers grow, and the label signs the next one.

And the repertoire narrows.

To return to the opening anecdote for a moment: in those same conversations, the friend in question was told quite plainly what the criteria were. There were, as the A&R put it, three routes onto the roster.

Instagram fame. Conventional photogenic appeal (the precise phrasing was less polite than that). Or winning a major competition, with the qualification that no guitar competition in the world would count as major enough.

For a classical guitarist, the third route is closed before you start. Which leaves two.

That is the gatekeeping, stated plainly by the person whose job it is to do it (salary earned. Sleeping comfortably at night).

The smaller labels operate differently. They are not, on the whole, asking for Instagram followers, partly because they know they are not going to get a player with a hundred thousand of them anyway. What they ask for instead is canonical repertoire.

They need to sell CDs (as though anyone is selling many copies of anything in 2026), and assume, not unreasonably, that familiar pieces will move more units than unfamiliar ones. A musician with an unusual concept, a creative through-line, an interest outside the established rotation, has nowhere obvious to land. The majors filter for personality and platform. The boutiques filter for safety.

The narrowing happens at every tier. The artist who wants to do something interesting, and is not also a content creator, is squeezed from both ends.

I do not think the musicians who have succeeded in this system are doing anything wrong. They have understood the rules and played by them, and some of them are genuinely good players, which makes the whole thing more complicated rather than less. The problem is not with the individuals. It is with institutions that have outsourced their artistic judgement to a platform built by people in Silicon Valley who have no stake in the quality of what gets made. They have a stake in whether it gets watched. Those are different incentives. When a record label uses follower count as a proxy for artistic viability, it is adopting the platform’s values without admitting it, or worse, without realising it.

It is not saying we do not care about the music. It is saying we care about the metrics... same thing.

This is not unique to music or to Instagram. Marissa MacWhirter wrote in the Herald recently that roughly two-thirds of the most influential people in Scottish arts are not artists but administrators, bureaucrats, property managers and broadcasters operating through arm’s-length bodies largely invisible to the public.

Marissa’s Article

A property manager in Glasgow decides whether a cultural space lives or dies. A national arts body spends hundreds of millions of pounds over fifteen years without a single external review of its governance. The people who control what gets made and heard are not the people who make it.

The mechanisms differ — a follower count here, a lease negotiation there, a funding decision somewhere else — but the structure is the same. Artists are structurally subordinate to intermediaries whose incentives have nothing to do with the quality of the work.

Everyone is a creator now, which is another way of saying that no one has to be artistic.

The honest, embarrassing thing is that I am not outside this system. I am inside it, resenting it, and complying with it simultaneously, which I suspect is the most common position among working musicians and the one least represented in the discourse.

Here is what my job actually involves: I practise. I teach — because that is how I pay rent — I do my own bookkeeping and invoicing. I file my own self-assessment. I am building a website, partly because I want a home for my work (that I own) and partly because I know a promoter will Google me before they book me, and there needs to be something there. I record my own videos. I write (duh).

On any given day I am performer, teacher, accountant, web developer, videographer, copywriter, administrator. (Creative director, educational lead, operations conductor, chief visionary consultant etc.) None of these roles, apart from the first two, are things I trained for, and none of them are paid. They are simply assumed: the invisible infrastructure of being a self-employed musician in 2026 (I think I just found the title for my next Substack piece).

And then the same institutions that rely on this infrastructure evaluate the results as though they reflect artistic seriousness, rather than one person’s capacity for unpaid labour.

And then there is Instagram. I have thought about which of my posts got the most engagement (I confess, I have an analytics dashboard made on Claude for all my social media channels). I have caught myself wondering whether I should be making more reels, and then hating that the thought occurred to me at all.

I have little ambition to learn an algorithm designed by people in Silicon Valley who have never sat in a practice room, who have no stake in the quality of what gets made, only in whether it gets watched. But I am learning it anyway, in the margins, because the system requires it.

I am not sure whether that system works for or against me. In writing this Substack, the answer feels clearer. But first, let me update my custom analytics dashboard.

The musicians who succeed in this system are the ones who were trained for it. The prodigy track — specialist school, conservatoire, competition circuit — produces a particular kind of compliance, and when that compliance is delivered into the Instagram era it transfers seamlessly. Post this reel. Play this repertoire. Smile at this camera.

There is something ironic about musicians appearing on podcasts describing how the institutional upbringing damaged them, how they had no autonomy outside of their teacher’s demands, while continuing to operate within an almost identical structure of external direction. They have swapped one set of instructions for another and called it freedom.

For the rest of us (mere mortals), not institutionally insulated, the challenge is maintaining some kind of artistic integrity while doing all of this.

Making decisions based on your own trajectory rather than the algorithm’s preferences. Staying true to what you want to play and how you want to present it.

What bothers me most is not the extra work. It is the reorientation of priorities that the extra work implies. When a gig becomes an opportunity to make content, something has shifted in what the gig is for.

The audience in the room becomes secondary to the audience on the feed. The performance becomes raw material for a reel. And the phone, the bloody phone, is always there now, asking whether this moment is being captured, whether this piece has a section that works in fifteen seconds.

It starts to colonise the parts of life that were supposed to be exempt from it. Like my basic right to a quiet commute.

I do not know what a serious creative life looks like when the infrastructure assumes you are a content creator first and a musician second. I am genuinely asking.

The old model, in which you trained seriously, played seriously, (perhaps even took yourself seriously) and hoped the work would eventually find its audience through some combination of merit and institutional support, is clearly dead, or at least on life support. The new model, in which you train, play, and maintain a content schedule that feeds an algorithm designed to maximise engagement for a platform that will never love you back, feels like something we have all accepted without ever quite agreeing to it.

The performer who sets up a phone on a tripod, plays Clair de Lune in the middle of a busy pavement, and switches off all awareness of the people trying to get past is not giving a performance. They are producing content that borrows the aesthetics of one.

The passers-by are not an audience. They are unpaid, non-consensual extras.

And the resulting video, once edited, captioned, posted, and swallowed by the feed, does not belong to the musician anymore. It belongs to Meta. It was always going to belong to Meta. That is the business model.

Anyway. I have practising to do, and a video to post.

A woman across from me has taken her shoes off, propped her feet on the seat opposite, and is filming her face with her phone held at arm's length (or as far as the seat in front allows, which is why her feet are now on the chair beside her, toes in red socks pointed at me). Her followers will never know about the shoes. If they did, would they still follow? She is performing the version of herself that does not have her feet on the seat with her socks out. I am, I suppose, doing something similar. I am dressed for an evening I have not yet arrived at.

A woman has just sat next to me in the kind of perfume that arrives several seconds before its wearer. She is dressed to go nowhere in particular but smells dressed to go somewhere; I am dressed to go somewhere but smell of having run back home from the station to check I had locked the door. We are all of us slightly out of register tonight.

Through the window, on the approach to Waterloo, the Shard. I think about the things that could go wrong inside a 309-metre glass building. Does the glass overheat in summer? How do they compensate for wind? Skyscrapers, I am told, sway. The thought arrives that I have never been in a building taller than a Glasgow tenement, that I once lived in multi-storey military family housing which is technically a vertical structure but is not, in any meaningful sense, a tall building. Tonight, I am going to my first skyscraper.

It is also our anniversary, mine and Celia’s, and the UK terror threat level was raised yesterday from substantial to severe, which means an attack is highly likely in the next six months. I have been thinking about this on and off all afternoon. The Shard is the kind of building I have, since 2001, learned to think about in a particular way. I have not mentioned this to Celia. The thought sits underneath all the others.

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A note on what I am wearing.

White shirt, sharp collar, the kind that suggests a banker. Universal Works blazer, the kind that suggests a working-class nod, or possibly a working-class costume worn by someone who is not. Trousers very broad, the kind that suggest art school, or more accurately, art-school wanker. On top, a Barbour cap, because a Barbour cap is what people who belong here wear. I am hoping, by means of the cap, to pass.

It is a mixed bag. None of it is quite me. Each garment is signalling to a different imagined audience, and they do not overlap, and the cap is the only one I am actively trying to get past. The shirt, the blazer, the trousers are aesthetic choices. The cap is a passport stamp.

Outside the Shard, two McLaren supercars are parked at the kerb, low and orange and immobile. They are still there when we leave three hours later, which means they have been parked, not driven, for the entire evening, which means they are not really cars. They are an installation. They are wealth in a vehicular costume, the way I am working-classness in a Universal Works costume, except their costume costs about £300,000 each.

Celia points at them and says, it’s just like Miami.

Celia, who is Sardinian, has lived in places that have actual Miamis. She delivers the line the way someone might say, this restaurant has a nice view. London Bridge as a small annexe of South Beach, a thing that has happened to the river while the rest of London was looking elsewhere. I have nothing to add to this. She is right. The Shard is not in London the way the Tate Modern is in London. It belongs to a category of building that is in cities the way Miami is in America, which is to say, mostly for people who are not from there.

Some Shard facts, gathered the way one gathers facts during a South Western Railway journey to a building one does not understand.

The Shard is 95% owned by the State of Qatar, via the Qatar Investment Authority. It was inaugurated by the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, in a ceremony attended by Prince Andrew, Duke of York. It was designed by Renzo Piano, an Italian. It is named after a phrase coined by its critics, who described its proposed appearance as a shard of glass through the heart of historic London — the developers liked the phrase, kept it, made it the building. It houses, on floors 53 to 65, ten luxury apartments priced at up to $65 million each, which the developers boasted in 2012 they could sell with no more than twenty phone calls, and which appear, more than a decade on, to be largely empty. It also houses the London bureau of Al Jazeera English, which means a Qatari state broadcaster reports on the world from inside a Qatari state-owned tower, in a country whose affairs it is reporting on.

UNESCO warned that the building might jeopardise the world heritage status of the Tower of London. John Prescott approved it anyway. Qatar owns more property in London than the late Queen.

I am about to eat sushi inside this building, on the floor directly below the empty apartments and several floors above Al Jazeera’s newsroom. The veterans in my family will be less than impressed.

Up the ear-popping lift.

Celia has given me a bouquet of roses, because it is our anniversary, which is a small role-reversal she is comfortable with and which the Shangri-La hospitality apparatus is not. At the security desk, my flowers are essentially strip-searched. A member of staff takes them, examines them, turns them, looks gravely into the bouquet as though the cellophane might contain something other than cellophane. They are returned to me. We ascend.

At the lift, a member of staff offers to hold the flowers. I decline. At the bar entrance, a member of staff offers to hold the flowers; a colleague nearby asks, with theatrical surprise, “are those for me?!” At the table, a member of staff offers to hold the flowers; a colleague nearby asks, with theatrical surprise, “are those for me?!” By the third occurrence it is clear that none of them is actually surprised, including the askers, who are following a script. The Shangri-La trains its staff in surprise-and-delight, and surprise-and-delight, performed five times in eight minutes (by five different people), ceases to be surprise-and-delight and becomes a kind of liturgy.

The same is true of the smiles. The smile of the man who pours the wine, the one who lays down the £24 sushi. The smile of the floor manager doing his rounds, and the man at the lift who has been smiling since we got here. None of these smiles are unkind. They are not, however, smiles in any sense that a smile is normally a smile. They are smiles in the sense that a uniform is a uniform. They are mandatory, monitored, and worn over the actual face of the person wearing them, who is, presumably, somewhere underneath, thinking about rent. I do not blame any of them. I would smile too if the alternative were a quiet conversation with a hospitality manager about my apparent unhappiness in the workplace (a conversation I’ve fallen victim to myself with coffee shop and pub managers). After a certain quantity of these smiles — say, four floors’ worth, including the lift — the receiver begins to feel that something has gone wrong. Not with the staff. With smiling.

GONG is located on floor 52. It is difficult to imagine all 95 floors containing these smiles.

The bar is named after dougong, the traditional Chinese system of interlocking wooden brackets used in temple construction. So we have a Chinese-named bar inside an Italian-designed Qatari-owned British landmark serving Japanese small plates. The building is four nationalities deep before the food arrives.

The sushi is Loch Duart salmon. The fish and I are both Scottish transplants to London. The fish has done better.

Our chairs put my knees at my chest. The wine list is short and shy: one rosé, three reds, three whites, all of them the kind of wine you order with no enthusiasm. Or the kind of bottle that is four times the price of a glass, which is already £25. Even the price-pushing is unsubtle. I should have guessed as much, inside a building that is itself unsubtle. The food is Japanese-leaning small plates, a sushi roll for £24. There is a £30 minimum spend per person to look at the view. They enforce a minimum at GONG because, presumably, without one some people would order a single glass of water and stay for the sunset, the way some people would do anything for a view.

The geometry of the floor is interesting. Past the toilets is a corridor. Past the corridor is the gym. Past the gym is the spa. Past the spa is the Sky Pool. So I return from the toilet via a glass-walled view of strangers on treadmills, which I am seated to eat sushi opposite. The same toilets are shared by the bar and the gym and, presumably, by guests of the hotel and, presumably, by anyone living in the empty apartments thirteen floors above us, although there does not appear to be anyone living in them. The plumbing serves a population that is mostly hypothetical.

I think about this while eating sushi. The building is a stage set. The cars outside are parked. The flats above are empty. The hospitality is scripted. The view, admittedly, is real. Possibly the only thing in the building that is not performing is the view, and the view is unaffected by anything happening inside the building, and the view existed before the building did, and would exist after.

Celia, at the table, with the gym, the toilets, the sauna and spa behind her.

She tells me that this is her first proper anniversary date. She says this the way she said the Miami line, as a small factual report. I have been nervous about being inside a tall building, on a day when British terror assessments suggested we should perhaps not be inside a tall building, on top of the standard-issue anxieties of being a 29-year-old man who grew up in multi-storey military family housing and has never until tonight been higher off the ground than the top floor of a tenement.

We are both at heights we are not used to. She is emotionally higher than usual. I am physically higher than ever. We are both, intermittently, checking the windows for cracks.

I do not say any of this. I write it down, later, in a notebook I have brought to my own anniversary dinner, which is itself the joke. She has given me roses. I am giving her observational essay material. The asymmetry is the relationship in miniature. She is generous in three dimensions. I am generous in prose, which, as gifts go, has the considerable advantage of not requiring the giver to actually be present.

After dinner, we had tickets to The View from the Shard, which is the official viewing platform on floor 72, twenty floors above where we had just been eating, and the part of the building specifically designated for looking. We needed to descend from floor 52, passing, in reverse order, all those perpetual smiles. We then exited the building, passed once again the ornamental McLarens, joined a queue around the side, and eventually, passing new smiles, reascended to floor 72. It is not immediately clear what the extra twenty floors are for.

Before the lift, airport-style security: belts off, bags through, the works. After security, you are directed, with no real pretence of choice, into a hallway where a man with a camera asks you to pose. Three poses. One serious. One he describes as "the opposite," which I think meant candid (candid became the default after we both looked to each other to confirm what "the opposite" actually meant). One looking directly up at a second camera mounted on the ceiling above your head, which, because of the brim of my Barbour cap, I cannot actually see, and which therefore captures an image of a cap. You are not told what the photographs are for. You do them, and are released into the lift, having been ticket-checked, security processed, photographed, and not yet shown anything.

The lift opens onto a crowd. Everyone is fighting, in the polite English way, for the same six feet of window. Hands above heads, holding phones. A French family arguing about which one is the Walkie Talkie. A woman taking the same photograph her neighbour just took, of the same window, from the same angle, twelve seconds later, as if her phone might catch something different. Nobody is looking at London. Everyone is photographing London. The ones who appear to be looking are posing for a candid shot (having rehearsed 'candid' downstairs). There is a difference, and on floor 72 on a Friday night the difference is everywhere.

The lights inside are bright. So bright that the windows, which I had assumed would be the point, are essentially mirrors. You stand at the glass and what you see, mostly, is the room behind you. The room behind you is the queue. So I stood at the window of the highest viewing platform in Western Europe, and what I saw was a Barbour cap, Celia's hand pointing at something I couldn't quite make out, and a man in a red shirt taking a flash photograph that turns the entire pane into a brief white flare, and underneath all of this, faintly, the lights of the City — the Walkie Talkie, the Cheesegrater, St Paul's, the Thames — like a second image bleeding through a first.

On the way out, the photographs return. They are displayed in the gift shop, on large screens, beside large contactless payment terminals, at £25 for five and £35 for ten. Members of staff hover, ready to help you find your face in the catalogue. We extracted one digital copy for free by walking briskly past the big screens with our heads down, the way you walk past a charity collector. The staff offered, several times, to help us at the big computers. The big computers had very large payment terminals attached. We declined the help.

The one copy we extracted is a green-screen composite. We have been pasted in front of a sky containing Big Ben, a red telephone box, the London Eye, the Shard itself, a black cab, and three hot air balloons carrying, respectively, an Italian flag, a Union Jack, and a Qatari flag. Italian, presumably, for Celia. Union Jack for the country we were standing in. Qatari for the building we were standing in. The souvenir cannot help disclosing who owns it.

I had paid extra to look at my own reflection.

Coming down.

The McLarens are still parked. The threat level is still severe. The flats above us are still empty. The door alarm in the lift sounds — to my ear, on this particular evening — like the kind of alarm that means something else. It is not. It means the doors are closing. It does this at every floor and confuses us every time. Celia and I, compacted in beside five tourists, fall away from the city in glass-framed segments. As we descend, ears popping, a German woman shows the lift a photograph on her phone — she has snuck into a nearby toilet to capture what may be the best dumping view in London. The lift giggles in four languages.

Celia and I are walking back to London Bridge station in the kind of silence two people share when they have had a good evening and are both, separately, still having it. I am holding my flowers and we are walking back to London Bridge station in the kind of silence two people share when they have had a good evening and are both, separately, still having it.

I tell my neighbour the next day that we had dinner at the Shard for our anniversary. He is Australian, and he says, dryly, that’s quite a test of companionship. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.

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Happy Anniversary gorgeous Celia. F*** The Shard x

It was a response to a post about living in Richmond as a Scotsman. Watching people in £90,000 Land Rovers drive to Waitrose in wellies, past municipal flowerbeds, with no livestock for miles. The clothes don’t match the absence of nature. The closest I’ve seen is a sausage dog named Winston. He lives in a five-bedroom Victorian terrace and eats better than most people in Govan.

Picture me here. Tuesday, 22 degrees, wine better, reading from my phone about the north I came from coming apart.

I replied with two words of my own: “To what?”

I lived in Glasgow for over ten years. Studied there, played there, went to warehouse parties and jazz clubs and art school nights that don’t exist anymore. I remember a pint and lentil dhal at The Vic right before a Frogbeats night of hip-hop and jungle. I met SOPHIE, Max Cooper and Optimo and other amazing musicians. I saw my first ever gig at the O2 ABC on Sauchiehall Street. We Were Promised Jetpacks. I was still in high school.

Before Glasgow, I grew up in Glenrothes. A Scottish new town in Fife, built from nothing in the late 1940s. Scattered across its housing estates and roundabouts and pedestrian underpasses are over 140 public sculptures, most of them created or commissioned by a man called David Harding, who was employed as the town’s artist from 1968 to 1978. He was embedded in the planning department. He moved his family there. His assistant, Stanley Bonnar, made the concrete hippos that became the town’s unofficial symbol.

Can you believe someone had decided that art was part of what made a place liveable.

Harding later went to Glasgow School of Art and founded the Environmental Art department. Several of his students went on to be nominated for or win the Turner Prize. The pipeline runs from concrete hippos on a housing estate in Fife to Turner Prize winners in galleries around the world. Not a coincidence. Just what happens when you fund artists and give them rooms.

I spent a lot of time in those rooms. One of my flatmates was a sculpture student at the art school. I'd go to exhibitions, hang around the studios, then head to the club nights. Frogbeats, Optimo, Slam. That's where I heard things I didn't understand yet

David Harding died on 21 February 2026. Five weeks later, artists were protesting outside City Property's offices to save Trongate 103.

These weren’t career moves. They were formation. The boundary between audience and participant was porous. You’d go to a Capri Collective night at Flat 0/1 and end up talking to the DJ about music you’d never heard of. You’d sit in Chai Ovna drinking Russian Caravan and pretend you were having a deep thought. You’d play jazz standards badly at Dukes and nobody minded.

The spaces that shaped me weren’t the practice rooms at the Conservatoire. They were the rooms around it. The rooms where nobody was assessing you. The rooms where you could be bad at things without consequence.

Here’s what has happened to those rooms.

The Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building has been a burnt-out shell since 2018. A second fire, after the first in 2014. A decade on and it’s still standing there like a headstone.

The Centre for Contemporary Arts on Sauchiehall Street closed with immediate effect in January 2026. The locks were changed. Artists were locked out of their own equipment.

The O2 ABC, where I saw that first gig, was damaged in the same 2018 fire. It’s been closed ever since. A developer wants to demolish it and build student flats. Of course.

The Vic is gone. Chai Ovna is gone. Flat 0/1 is gone (more on that in a moment). The jazz at Duke’s was shut down after complaints from the neighbours. Fair enough. It moved to somewhere on Sauchiehall Street I can’t remember. That didn’t last.

The McLellan Galleries, which used to host major exhibitions, now has a single coffee stand inside the entrance. Next door, a poke bowl shop is doing fine. A tenner for lunch is alive and well. A publicly listed building is not.

And then, on March 8th, a fire started in a vape shop on Union Street and tore through a 175-year-old Victorian building next to Glasgow Central Station. The dome collapsed. The station shut for over a week. Just another building gone. Lithium batteries in the shop apparently accelerated the blaze.

Glasgow keeps losing its buildings. Fire, neglect, rent hikes. Different mechanisms. Same result.

The Flat 0/1 story is worth telling because it shows how the system works.

Flat 0/1 was a techno bar on Sauchiehall Street. It sat upstairs from a nightclub called Kushion, in the same building, owned by the same people. After a stabbing on the Kushion dancefloor and a string of serious incidents, the police and courts ordered closures. G1 had to shut a venue. They chose Flat 0/1.

The underground one. The free entry one. The one with the Capri Collective nights. The weird crowd. The atmosphere you can’t manufacture.

Kushion was the commercial earner. Flat 0/1 was expendable. Same postcode, same landlord. The market doesn’t select for cultural value. It selects for revenue. Try that in Berlin and see what happens.

But the clearest case study is happening right now.

Trongate 103 opened in 2009 after £8.5 million of public investment, meant to create a sustainable grassroots arts community. It houses Glasgow Print Studio, Street Level Photoworks, Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, GMAC Film, and others. Tenants were promised 25-year leases at around £1 per square foot. The handshake was real. The contracts were never signed.

Six months after opening, the building was transferred from Glasgow City Council to City Property, the council’s arm’s-length commercial property company. A space built for culture was now a revenue asset. Tenants call it a “structural contradiction.” I’d call it something shorter.

In February 2026, all tenants received notices to quit. Sign a new lease at four times the current rent, plus uncapped service charges... or leave. The council had commissioned an independent study suggesting rent could sustainably rise to about £2 per square foot. City Property set it at £4, plus an estimated £385,000 in service charges. They commissioned the study and then ignored it.

The total bill under the new terms? Roughly £700,000, split between several cultural charities. Three or four organisations are expected to go bankrupt. GMAC has already confirmed it will relocate. On March 27th, artists and supporters protested outside City Property’s offices. A petition has gathered over 13,000 signatures.

Paul Sweeney, the local MSP, called it “slow motion cultural collapse.” He’s not wrong. But it isn’t slow if you’ve been watching within a decade.

I should say what’s still there. Glasgow isn’t dead. That would be a dishonest essay. If you didn’t go to these venues, these after-parties, these art school nights, your Glasgow might still be intact. This essay is about my Glasgow.

The Barrowland is still the Barrowland. King Tut’s is still King Tut’s. Celtic Connections just ran its 33rd edition across twenty-odd venues. SWG3 is still operating, still hosting Yardworks every year. Everybody to Kenmure Street, a documentary about the 2021 Pollokshields immigration raid protest, just won a Sundance award and premiered at Glasgow Film Festival in February. Barry Burns of Mogwai did the score.

And then there’s Òran Mór. A converted church at the top of Byres Road where A Play, A Pie and A Pint has been running for over two decades as Scotland’s longest daytime theatre initiative. They’ve opened a nightclub underneath. Whisky tastings, comedy, weddings, whatever keeps the lights on. It works because it’s a commercially successful multi-venue operation. Good for them. I mean that.

But look up. On the ceiling is Alasdair Gray’s Celestial Ceiling mural, one of the largest pieces of public art in Scotland. Gray painted it from 2004 until he couldn’t anymore. It’s unfinished. His murals are scattered across the city. The Ubiquitous Chip. Hillhead subway station. Greenhead Church. They’re still there, on the walls and ceilings of rooms that other people now run.

Lanark is my favourite novel. It’s also, beneath the postmodern scaffolding, a story about a man who isn’t fit for the real world. Lanark is obsessive, pathetic, driven half-mad by his fixation on painting a church. Aptly self-referential. Gray studied fine art and mural design at Glasgow School of Art. The autobiography is barely disguised and entirely self-deprecating. He’s poking fun at himself. But the joke contains something serious. The art school is the only place Lanark can exist. Not because he’s special, but because he’s useless everywhere else.

There’s a line in John Williams’ Stoner about the university existing for people who have nowhere else to go. I think about that a lot. A third space for life’s biggest losers... or weirdos. For some of us, they’re the only viable habitat. Destroy the habitat, and you don’t just inconvenience those people, you eliminate them.

Gray is the reason half the Scottish writers who came after him exist. He popularised the line "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation," which is engraved on the wall of the Scottish Parliament. The Alasdair Gray Archive, a free charity at the Whisky Bond, still runs tours, commissioning new work, preserving his studio. They celebrated 45 years of Lanark on Gray Day this February. The legacy is cared for.

So what survives, and what doesn’t? Scale and revenue. The Barrowland survives because it’s an institution. Òran Mór survives because it’s a business. Celtic Connections survives because it has public funding and 33 years of brand recognition. What doesn’t survive is the weird, accidental, underfunded stuff that nobody built a business model around. The rooms where you were allowed to be bad at things. The rooms that cost nothing and produced everything.

Gray’s murals are still on the ceilings. The buildings underneath them are being priced out or burned down.

I have been watching.

After I graduated, I taught and performed. Performing across Scotland, as I’ve written before, doesn’t pay. Teaching wasn’t much better.

I would check TES Jobs, My Job Scotland. One independent school vacancy across an entire year... in Dundee. Most jobs moved by word of mouth. If you weren’t the person who got recommended, you just never heard about it. I managed four or five private students. Got pushback when I raised my rate from £42 to £45.

I didn’t see any of this as a reflection of the market. I thought it was about me—that I wasn’t working hard enough, wasn’t skilled enough, that something was wrong with my playing, my hustle, my attitude. I blamed myself the way young graduates do when the infrastructure around them is eroding and they haven’t yet learned to look at the economy instead of the mirror.

I moved to London in September 2024. In my first six months, I applied for over twenty independent school teaching positions. In Scotland, I’d seen one or two across an entire year. The same person, the same skills, in a different economy, produces completely different outcomes--not to mention interview expenditure.

Moving to London was as much about self-satisfaction as job satisfaction. It was the discovery that the problem had never been me. It was the market. And that discovery felt like putting down something I’d been carrying for years without knowing it.

“Come home,” she wrote. She meant it warmly. The arts are being cut across the UK, she said, but it’s the people that make us. It’s not hopeless, just frustrating.

She’s not wrong. But the people who made Glasgow’s arts scene are, increasingly, the people who left it. The spaces closing and the people leaving aren’t separate processes. Sub Club empties a little. The next generation forms fewer connections. Fewer people stay. Fewer spaces survive. It’s a spiral, not a bad patch.

Glasgow has something Edinburgh lost a long time ago. Edinburgh has been completely consumed by tourism. Cities across Europe are introducing tourist taxes to protect themselves. Museums around the world, including in London, are starting to charge non-resident visitors entry.

Glasgow is rougher, more working class, more stubborn in its character. It always has been. Whether it will ever lose that identity is hard to say. But the bridges have been built. The natural wine bars will open in Govan soon enough. The same council that built the bridge is the one pricing out Trongate 103.

I was raised in Scotland, gained skills that Scotland could not accommodate economically, and had to leave. I might leave again. I might end up in Germany or Italy, just another person from somewhere else. And I’m sure there will be someone in Milan or Frankfurt doing exactly what I’m doing now. Watching their city fill with people who weren’t from there originally. Watching their version of Flat 0/1 close so their version of Kushion can stay open.

I’d hate to imagine what it’s like to be a student at the Conservatoire or the Art School now. When I was there, the infrastructure was already fraying. But it was still there. What does someone graduating this year actually have? A burnt-out art school. A locked CCA. A Trongate that might not exist by summer. Only one thing is certain: a £12 brunch bagel on Great Western Road.

Where do you go when the stuff that made you is no longer there?

I don’t have a good answer. I carry Glasgow with me the way you carry any place that formed you. The formation happened even if the rooms it happened in are gone. I can’t go home, because the home I’d be returning to doesn’t exist. The buildings are coffee stands, student flats, boarded up or charred.

Come home. To what? I’m making my own rooms now.

My neighbourhood has been redesigned overnight. The White Swan by the Thames now has a pushchair-to-table ratio of about three to one. Every father in Richmond has apparently decided that a Tuesday morning is the right time to get a trim with a four-year-old on their lap. The whole area runs on a uniform of Lululemon and Barbour that suggests everyone here has just finished a spin class or owns a farm, neither of which is true. I’m sitting among them dressed like a man who clearly doesn’t have a Peloton, which around here is basically a distinguishing feature. I texted the guy who lives around the corner. He’s busy. Everyone’s busy. They’re all doing the same thing, which is looking after their kids and pretending it’s fine.

I am trying to practise. The walls are thin. The kids next door are not practising anything.

Meanwhile I’ve been informed, via Substack, that I ought to be having a slow morning. It’s a whole genre. A man in a linen shirt describes the light through the shutters and the quality of his second coffee. He is in no rush. He has surrendered to the morning. It reads like the voiceover for a cologne you’d find in duty free.

My slow morning is not like this. My slow morning happened because the clocks went forward and I didn’t notice. I woke up at what I thought was nine but was actually ten, still in yesterday’s t-shirt, and put the hot water on. There was no linen. There was no surrendering. Only a brief negotiation with the boiler.

What I have actually done with this first week off is notice, belatedly, that I have a body. It’s been there the whole time, apparently, but during term it functions mostly as the thing that carries me between schools on the Lioness Line. Now that nobody needs me in a classroom I’ve started thinking I should probably run, or stretch, or do something that isn’t just walking to a station. The fact that it takes the total absence of work for me to remember I have a body at all probably says more about the job than it does about discipline. Nine months of the year I am a brain on a commute. Three weeks off and I discover I have knees. The knees crave an impulse trip. The pockets above those knees advise otherwise.

There’s more in all of this. About idleness, about fires in Glasgow, about the point at which living started to feel like something you perform. But those are longer pieces. This is a holiday. I’m keeping it short.

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I keep a folder on my laptop called “Gig Offers.” It’s a folder I open when I want to feel like I’m working.

It’s a collection of emails I sent, drafted carefully, politely, hopefully, to churches, concert societies, and cathedrals across the UK, asking if they might consider letting me come and play for them. A classical guitarist, cold-emailing venues for the chance to perform for free.

I used to block out time in my calendar for this. “Concert enquiries.” It sat between teaching prep and practice, and it made me feel like I was working. Like a self-employed musician running something that looked enough like a business. Drafting emails, researching venues, following up. The calendar looked full. The inbox looked busy.

The replies, when they came, were always warm. The fees, when they existed, were nothing. Not low. Nothing.

But the paperwork. The paperwork was spectacular.

St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street runs a Tuesday and Friday recital series. To be considered, you submit a CV detailing recent performances with links to recordings from the last twelve months. A booking form is due sixteen weeks in advance. Programmes are locked one month before the concert. Photographs must be in original jpeg format. “Scans of old photos/leaflets are not acceptable.” There is a cancellation policy. There is a waiting list.

In return, you receive the use of a Kawai medium grand piano, built 1986, and access to a safe room for your belongings.

The fee, as I may have mentioned, is nothing. St Bride’s holds a retiring collection at the rear of the church. The proceeds go to the church.

I read that twice. You perform for free. The audience donates money. The church keeps it.

They do print very nice programmes, though. In-house.

St Clement Danes, also in London, takes a collaborative approach. You collaborate on everything except the bit where someone gets paid.

The performer information document runs to about a page and a half. In it, you’re asked to design a colour A4 poster including a photo, the date and time, performer names, and a programme blurb. Post stories and updates on Instagram. Keep your belongings close during rehearsal, as there have been thefts. Help stewards set up the space. Film your own performance. Download a contactless payment app (they recommend Squareup or SumUp) so you can collect your own donations, since many people don’t carry cash. After the concert, help watch the cash donations and return the piano, organ, lectern, and pews to their original positions.

The public, by the way, can wander in and out during your performance. The main doors stay open.

You are, apparently, the performer, the marketing department, the graphic designer, the social media manager, the production crew, the videographer, the payment processor, and security. The venue provides walls.

There’s also a recommendation to contact a videographer who makes cinematic social media visuals of concerts. She gets a plug. You get to watch your own guitar case.

And afterwards, you post about it on Instagram. “Great to perform at St Clement Danes today.” It looks like a career. It has all the framing of serious work. But just like the concert enquiries in the calendar, it’s productivity that doesn’t translate as turnover. You’re marketing an event you weren’t paid for, to an audience that will expect you to do the next one for free too.

The Edinburgh Society of Musicians operates at a slightly more elevated level. They expect formal repertoire and full programme notes. The kind of thing you’d prepare for a proper concert, because, to all appearances, this is one.

They reimburse direct expenses up to a maximum of £200. With receipts. Via a form you download from their website.

A return flight from London to Edinburgh runs about £100 to £150. A night in Edinburgh, another £80 to £120. Food, taxis, the tram to the airport. Call it another £30, if you’re careful.

So the maximum reimbursement covers, at best, the flight and a hostel. The hours of repertoire preparation and the programme notes you wrote are, presumably, a gift.

The email confirming all of this ended with “I hope this helps.” I did the maths afterwards.

Carlisle Cathedral, a building that has stood since 1122, that draws tourists from around the world, wrote to say they couldn’t cover travel costs “at this stage.” But they suggested I get in touch if I ever had another enquiry from “up this way.”

Pop in if you’re passing. We’d love to have you. Bring your own lunch.

This is the part where I stop laughing at everyone else and admit that I’m the punchline.

In 2024, St John’s Kirk in Perth emailed to offer me a lunchtime concert slot. Perth, Scotland. Not the one in Australia. If you haven’t heard of St John’s Kirk, don’t worry. Neither has anyone outside of Perth, Scotland.

It took three months for the director to reply to my initial enquiry, which I think tells you where soloists sit in the priority list. When he did, he asked what fee I’d be looking for, adding, with a warmth I’ve come to recognise as a negotiating position, that they “weren’t awash with cash” and would “need to come to some accommodation.”

I asked for £120. For an hour’s concert. Including expenses.

I wrote “I would be delighted to accept.” I meant it, at the time.

I would be delighted. To fly to Perth (Scotland), find somewhere to sleep, prepare a full recital programme, and net somewhere south of zero once the costs were totted up.

A year out of a master’s degree, building a career, you write “delighted” in emails. You don’t do the maths. You tell yourself it’s about the experience, the exposure, the thing on the CV. And you believe it, because your teacher believed it, because their teacher believed it.

Life changed. I moved to London in September 2024, took on teaching work, and couldn’t get the time off to fly back to Scotland for a recital that would cost me money to play. I cancelled. Two weeks’ notice. Apologetic email. Professional, I thought.

The director didn’t reply.

What I got instead was a copy of the newsletter he’d sent to his mailing list. Reading it back, you’d think I’d cancelled something important. As if I were the highlight of the season. I wasn’t. He announced that I, the “scheduled guitar soloist,” could no longer be with them. He described the “briefest moment of panic” before an “obvious and convenient solution presented itself.” He and two colleagues would play a programme of piano trios they were already performing three days later at another venue.

The newsletter closed with an apology that none of them could play the guitar.

This is a lunchtime concert series in Perth that can’t afford to pay its performers, and the director is writing about it like he’s programming the Proms. All for an event that, by his own admission, operates on loose change and goodwill.

Two weeks’ notice on a £120 gig. Public newsletter. Named. The slot filled in the time it took him to open his laptop.

I should have been angry. Mostly I just thought, well, there it is. There’s always someone else. There will always be another conservatoire graduate who hasn’t done the maths yet.

Nobody ever sat me down and said it outright. You just pick it up, in lessons, in passing, from the way people talk about the profession. Teaching is where you earn. Concerts are what you do for love. The gigs don’t pay, but you do them because the music matters.

It gets passed down during lessons. Not as a problem to solve. Just as a fact of life, like bad acoustics or cold churches. The rare professionals who actually prepare students for the economics of the industry only highlight how completely everyone else ignores it. By the time you graduate, you’ve already accepted that the thing you trained to do, perform, has no economic value. The thing you fell into to pay the bills, teaching, is where the money is.

The conservatoire charged me tuition to reach a professional standard. The profession doesn’t pay me to use it. I owe money because I became qualified, and I’m expected to work for free because I’m qualified.

The venues aren’t the only ones who’ve decided these concerts don’t matter. Musicians use them too, as a chance to run a programme in public before a competition or a paid recital somewhere that counts. A dry run with a congregation. The audience isn’t the point. The stage time is.

Which means everyone involved has already agreed that the event itself is worthless. The performer is treating it as a rehearsal. The venue is filling a slot. The audience is incidental. The booking forms go out, the jpegs get submitted, the programmes get printed, and nobody in the room thinks this is the real thing. It’s all preparation for somewhere else.

There is another way.

Live Music Now pays its musicians. It also provides CPD training, mentoring, and professional development. It puts performers into care homes, hospitals, and schools. Venues that are, frankly, more demanding and more exposed than any church recital. A child in a school assembly will tell you to your face if you’re boring. A patient in a hospital ward might not remember you were there five minutes after you leave.

LMN treats this as skilled, professional work. And it funds it accordingly.

If a charity placing musicians in hospital wards can find the budget to pay performers, a London church with a mailing list and a waiting list and a jpeg policy can find it too. The Edinburgh Society of Musicians can find it. Carlisle Cathedral, standing since 1122, gift shop and all, can find it.

They choose not to because they don’t have to. The supply never runs out. The conservatoires keep graduating musicians who’ve been pre-taught to expect nothing. The pipeline does the venues’ work for them.

Timothée Chalamet says ballet and opera are dying. The concert series already have. They just haven’t stopped sending booking forms. Still requesting jpegs in original format, still locking programmes a month out, still running sixteen-week booking deadlines, as if it’s a functioning economy. The infrastructure is immaculate. The money isn’t there.

I should say something that complicates everything I’ve just written.

These are genuinely amazing places to play. Dunkeld Cathedral. Glasgow Cathedral. St Bride’s itself, for that matter. The acoustics are extraordinary. The architecture does something to the music that no wine bar or living room ever will. A Bach Sarabande in a 12th-century nave is not the same piece of music as a Bach Sarabande in a function room.

And that’s the trap.

I love playing in cathedrals. They know I love playing in cathedrals. That love is the leverage. Nobody exploits a plumber’s passion for pipes. But a musician who gets chills from the sound of a guitar bouncing off a stone ceiling? That person will do it for free. And everyone in the chain is counting on it.

Fifteen pensioners in a vast, freezing nave, the heating off, your fingers barely working. The Ginastera sonata you save til last once your fingers are warm. It’s still beautiful. That’s what makes it so difficult to walk away. And that’s exactly why the economics never change. The experience is real. The joy is real. The money isn’t.

If I ever go back to one of these venues, it will be on my terms. Not because the maths finally works, but because I’ve decided the experience means something to me beyond a line on a CV and a net loss on a spreadsheet.

You can build your own infrastructure, in small ways.

A room. A series. A mailing list that belongs to you. Fifty people who actually came to hear you play, rather than wandered in from the street. A ticket price that reflects the fact that this is work.

Some of the best concert experiences I’ve had were never in churches. They were in living rooms, in friends’ flats, in a local wine bar where I know the owners and I’m playing to people from my area. The very people whose children I teach. It’s a shared experience in a way that a lunchtime recital in an empty nave never is. I can stop mid-programme and talk to people about the music, and it becomes a conversation rather than a performance. Paired with a glass of wine. No booking form. No jpeg policy. No one wandering in off the street to check their phone.

And it doesn’t have that awful jazz bar feel either. Because trust me, when you play a note on the classical guitar, people listen.

It doesn’t scale quickly. It doesn’t come with a waiting list or a sixteen-week booking form. There’s no prestige attached to it, at least not at first. You have to do the same jobs the churches ask you to do, but this time the outcome is yours.

More importantly, the terms are yours.

The audience knows what they’re there for. The event isn’t a rehearsal for somewhere else. And when money changes hands, it goes to the person doing the work.

It’s a smaller model. But it’s a real one.

I stopped accepting free gigs last year. It felt like a small, necessary act of integrity.

It changed absolutely nothing. The concerts went ahead. The slots were filled. Someone else played for free, or for £120 including expenses, or for the contents of a collection plate that went to the church.

I know how this reads. Like a complaint. But I’d ask any musician reading this to open the last email they sent accepting an unpaid gig. Read it back. Count the hours you spent preparing. Add the travel. Add the accommodation. Add the programme notes you wrote and the poster you designed and the Instagram story you posted.

Then add up what your training cost.

We all have fees to pay back. Tuition, living costs, years of our lives spent in practice rooms getting good enough to be told the work doesn’t pay. The least the industry can do is make it possible.

Stop writing “I would be delighted.” Start doing the maths.

He is also, depending on which corner of the internet you wandered into this week, either a cultural vandal who disrespected centuries of artistic tradition or a brave truth-teller who finally said what everyone was thinking.

He is, in reality, neither.

He’s a film actor on a press tour who said something a bit clumsy about ballet and opera. The response to it has been far more interesting than the comment itself.

The comment came during a CNN and Variety podcast disguised as an AA Meeting (a new cultural phenomenon) with Matthew McConaughey, a philosophical Texan who says “bro” and “dude” with absolute sincerity, and a young actor currently buzzing off the fastest rise to acclaim in Hollywood.

At one point Chalamet explained that he doesn’t want to be working in art forms where the whole project is just keeping the thing alive, where “no one cares about this anymore.”

Then, sensing the room temperature drop slightly, he added: “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

It was flip. It was reductive. It also wasn’t really about ballet and opera.

If you watch the full conversation rather than the clip doing the rounds, his point was something else entirely. He was worrying that cinema might be sliding into the same position, an art form people revere but increasingly don’t show up for. Ballet and opera were the reference point, not the target.

Which, if anything, is a useful question to hear asked out loud by someone with an audience.

But context rarely survives the journey online. Clips travel. The discourse follows. And before long the whole thing becomes another small ritual of public signalling.

Within days, the classical arts world responded with more energy and coordination than I’ve seen from it in years.

The Metropolitan Opera posted a clapback video. The Royal Ballet invited him to experience “the sheer magic of live performance.” Seattle Opera offered a 14% discount using Chalamet’s name as a promo code. Dancers and singers posted open letters. Misty Copeland pointed out that Chalamet had asked her to promote his film just weeks earlier, leveraging her dance career. Doja Cat called him out, then went back on it, admitting she’d never been to a ballet or an opera and was, in her words, “virtue signalling.” Doja Cat, at least, was honest about what was happening.

I’m a classical guitarist. I teach in schools. I play in hospitals, cathedrals, care homes, and the occasional recital hall if someone remembers to book one. Most weeks I spend more time explaining to twelve-year-olds why their nails matter than debating the cultural relevance of opera on Instagram.

Curtain lifts. Enter Substack.

(I’m writing this cultural hit-piece listening to Injury Reserve, for what it’s worth. The idea that people who care about classical music only listen to classical music is part of the same flattening that got us here.)

So when I say the response to Chalamet left me feeling something closer to disappointment than solidarity, it’s worth saying where I’m standing. Because the only thought I now have after watching all this unfold is: where was this energy six months ago?

Where was the Met’s social media team when Northern Ballet announced cuts to its live musicians? Where were the open letters when English National Opera was effectively gutted and politely relocated out of London, its future as a producing house left hanging? Where were the discount codes and the clapback videos when orchestras across the country were shrinking their rosters?

Where was Gondor?

Nowhere. Because those stories don’t come with a villain who has 60 million Instagram followers.

No productive discourse ever happens on social media. It can't. The platform dictates the response. Social media rewards emotional charge and the repetition of a shared voice above all else. It has no patience for complexity, nuance, or the slow, unglamorous work of looking honestly at your own problems.

What it does brilliantly is turn a clumsy remark into a week of outrage.

Timmy’s comments were a gift to the algorithm. A young, privileged, photogenic actor dismissing art forms that real people have given their lives to. The take writes itself. It practically demands to be shared.

And so, for about a week, the classical arts world discovered unity, something it almost never has. The cause of this sudden solidarity? A shared dislike of a rich actor saying something mildly stupid on camera. (Can you smell the elephant in the room?)

But it’s a false unity, a borrowed one. These institutions and artists didn’t rally around a shared vision for survival. They rallied around a shared enemy. One does not simply ignore a twenty-nine-year-old actor on a press tour.

A Fellowship of outrage.

The solidarity was reactive, not creative. It made marketing content, not strategy. And the moment Chalamet stops trending, which, trust me, his publicist is working on, the consensus will melt back into the same fragmented, underfunded, desperate mess it always was.

The cruelest part? Chalamet isn’t some outsider taking shots. His mother danced with the School of American Ballet. His sister trained there too. He grew up backstage at the Koch Theater. This isn’t a Hollywood ignoramus who wandered into a concert hall by accident. He was raised inside the very world he’s being crucified for describing honestly. Sure, you can argue his tone was off, his framing self-serving, that he conflated cultural value with box-office viability. Fine. But the man grew up watching ballet and chose a different path. And when he explained why, the industry he grew up in didn’t pause to reflect. It made Instagram content instead.

I don't choose my dislikes based on what's trending.. I grew out of my high-school era. I prefer to dislike the problems at their core. And the core problem here isn’t a twenty-nine-year-old actor with a press-tour ego. It’s an industry that’s known for years it’s in trouble and still can’t summon the energy to fight for itself until someone famous gives it a reason to be offended.

And while we’re on the subject of who deserves a voice in the arts, I watched A Complete Unknown.

Don’t get me wrong, I cringe when twenty-something males say “bro” like they’re perpetually live-streaming on Twitch. Think what you like about Timmy’s shining ego on press tours. But the guy learned those instruments. He went from knowing two chords to travis-picking while delivering lines on camera, live, not mimed, over five years. I hold a BMus and an MMus in classical guitar performance from a national Conservatoire. Trust me, learning guitar isn’t easy. Travis-picking, takes a minute (years duh) to sound natural. And he did that while delivering lines. This isn’t dress-up. He put in the hours and, in true meta-Dylan fashion, came out the other side with something genuine. He deserves a voice in the arts. That his voice said something uncomfortable doesn’t disqualify him. If anything, the seriousness with which he approached someone else’s musicianship makes his observations about classical arts harder to dismiss, not easier.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that none of the clapback videos want to touch. The numbers back him up. In America, 54% of the largest ballet companies ran a deficit in 2023, up from 20% the year before. Attendance for live dance nearly halved between 2017 and 2022. The Met itself, the same institution that posted a slick social media response to Chalamet, is reportedly in deep financial crisis. Opera companies across the world are wrestling with how to stay loyal to artistic values while facing audiences that are ageing and shrinking.

Before you throw your toys out the pram via Instagram Reels thinking nobody cares about what you make, let me reassure you that you do in fact matter, enormously. But mattering and thriving are not the same thing. The gap between the two is where most of us in classical arts actually live. We know it. We talk about it privately all the time. We just apparently needed a film actor to say it carelessly on camera before we’d talk about it publicly. Even then, in true performance fashion, we mostly talked about him rather than the problems themselves.

And here’s the thing nobody in the classical arts world seems to want to acknowledge. The Marty Supreme press tour, whatever you think of it, was a masterclass in promotion. Was it pushing beyond the limits of bearable? Yes. The Skype-call marketing stunt did fit a typical Safdie-esque cultural reference. But the onslaught of blimps and yellow jumpers was overkill for a very average film. And yet, it worked. Everyone saw it. Everyone talked about it. The film existed in the public consciousness whether you liked it or not.

I guess he's teaching us average art-joes that if you make something, scream it into the void. Get noticed. It's all the game is these days, regardless of what you make. Have we not at some point acknowledged to ourselves the importance of networking and promotion in our industry? Honestly, guys.

One of my favourite moments from a Tyler the Creator interview for Converse is about exactly this. He’s talking about artists who make things but don’t stand proudly by them.

“It’s something I’m noticing a lot with the generation right under me,” he says. “I don’t know if they’re too cool or don’t want to look thirsty, or not proud of their stuff, but they’ll put a song out, they’ll put it on their story… and that’s it.”

Skip to 42:00 for a masterclass in self-promotion.

He runs through the entire process:

“you went through something, you wrote words down, you figured out the structure, found the music, recorded it, went back and forth, fixed parts, got parts replayed, played it for people, edited it, mixed it. Sample clearances, paying the mixer, getting the artwork done. A whole chain of work. "And you mean to tell me that you're gonna be passive with your own stuff and just put it on your story once? Are you f*****g crazy bro?"

He said this while still promoting an album that came out a year ago.

Whether Chalamet is teaching us how it’s done or just playing the press-tour game to win that Oscar, the lesson is the same. And the irony is brutal. The ballet and opera companies that spent a week riding his name for engagement are the same ones that can’t—or won’t—bring that energy to their own work the other 51 weeks of the year.

They learned how to go viral, how to make sharp social media content, how to mobilise a community, how to get press coverage. They did it to clap back at a celebrity. Imagine if they did it to fill seats.
There’s a pattern here that goes beyond Chalamet and beyond this week. It’s the pattern of an industry that treats its structural crises as background noise and its cultural slights as emergencies.

Musicians being cut from productions barely make a ripple. A celebrity’s offhand remark? Instant, coordinated, institutional response. Loss of livelihoods is shrugged at. Loss of face is treated like an emergency.

In other words, it’s an industry that only finds its voice when there’s a celebrity to be angry at, not when its own people are being cut.

The Oscars happened last night. The discourse is already moving on. The companies that posted clapback videos will go back to deficit spreadsheets, difficult conversations about programming and funding, and decisions about what to cut next.

The musicians, dancers, and singers who do this work, and have always done this work, will keep doing it. Not because the algorithm noticed them for a week, but because they can’t imagine doing anything else.

We can waste time and 5G energy picking on a kid who’s clearly learning the ropes of celebrity-dom while his prefrontal cortex is still developing (late, likely, from all the hours spent learning the damn harmonica… you can relate).

Or we can talk about why our industry only fights back when it’s embarrassed, never when it’s bleeding.

For anyone who’s spent hours developing a craft in an isolated practice room or dance studio, shut off from living an actual life, all I can say is leave Britney alone.

We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. And the art forms we claim to care about will still be underfunded on Monday morning.

It’s not for me.

And I mean that in two directions. It’s not for me, as in I don’t do that anymore. And it’s not for me, as in — when I do play, it isn’t mine. It hasn’t been mine for a long time.

Yuja Wang (who, by the way, is a very good pianist), someone who sells out concert halls worldwide, admitted in an interview that during the pandemic she didn’t practise for an entire year. Not a day off, not a quiet month. A year. She said she had no motivation. She’d rather cook, or read, or watch a film. When the concerts stopped, the reason to play stopped with them.

I’ve followed a similar pattern. Reading, watching films, travelling, taking photographs. Filling the space with anything that isn’t the guitar.

Yuja Wang is someone who can play all four Rachmaninov concertos in a single evening. Someone with extraordinary technique. If there’s anything Yuja Wang and I have in common, it’s that we’ve both looked at our instruments and gone “why would I bother?” … Or that we’re both conservatoire graduates.

I’m definitely no concert pianist, nor do I have the international recognition that Yuja Wang has. For me, there’s no better picture of suffering than working to serve someone else artistically. She lost motivation because the external world disappeared. I’ve lost something else and I lost it while the external world was still very much there, still demanding things from me. I lost the sense that any of it belongs to me.

Her problem had a solution built into it. The concerts came back. The structure returned. She prepared for a marathon of all five Rachmaninov works at Carnegie Hall and found her way in again. My problem doesn’t have that shape. The lessons never stopped. The commutes never stopped. The gigs were always available. There was no dramatic absence to blame it on, no pandemic to point at. Just a slow, quiet erosion that happened while I was busy being useful to other people. Just six years of training, and then the need to earn a living.

That’s the gap nobody talks about. The distance between being told you’re an artist at nine in the evening and making flat whites for strangers at seven in the morning. Both things are true at the same time. And only one of them pays.

I wonder how many other music school kids went through all of this. BMus, MMus, six-year track. Learned to play Folios, Due Canzoni Lidie, the Gerhard Fantasia, Bach’s 997 Suite (all in the one programme, by the way). The conservatoire track doesn’t prepare you for a quiet erosion of a decade-long road, fizzled out by the true cost of profession.

I caught myself saying to someone the other night that in order to really rebuild this relationship with my guitar, I just want six months of not playing. No preparing for the next thing, no small gigs. Just a stretch of time not thinking about it.

But I can’t just stop. I can’t just take twelve months off when the economy stops. I can’t even take six. The lessons continue. The gigs continue. The machine that is supposed to sustain the music is the same machine that prevents me from recovering it.

For me, there’s no greater horror story than watching the most personal thing you have quietly become something you only do for other people.

The awkward thing is that it’s me who accepts the gigs. I accept them because they pay. I’ve played in concert halls, churches, arts festivals, cathedrals, care homes, haematology wards, intensive care units, SEN schools, state schools, private schools, cafes, bars, restaurants… a field. Maybe there’s something unquiet about this overbearing performance CV.

You play a set for a corporate function where nobody is listening and the music is wallpaper for someone’s networking drinks. You build a programme around what an audience might want, what a venue expects, what looks right on paper.

Some gigs are harder than others. I’ve stood in hotel function rooms playing to people who are actively trying not to hear me (I’ve genuinely taken a request from the only person coming up to speak to me asking me to play a little quieter). The music exists to create an atmosphere. Not even a specific atmosphere, just an atmosphere, a sense that the event has culture, that money has been spent on the right virtue-signalling thing. A fun thing to try: spend an evening being furniture that makes sound. Then check your bank balance after they pay you. Does your relationship with your instrument remain intact?

A student said something to me the other week. He said he admires people like me, people who do artistic work for a living. My response was that anyone who admires this work doesn’t know the true cost of it. And maybe they wouldn’t be saying so if they understood. The silent erosion that comes with losing your music to making tax digital, Xero invoices, and Outlook calendar events.

I turned it into a living, and the living took it, and it’s going to take more than a few catch-up lessons with my old teachers to get it back. I’m teaching other people to love the thing I can’t access for myself right now. And nobody in that room knows it.

I’m suspicious of anyone who says there is a solution. Some clean programme of rediscovery, some weekend retreat where you reconnect with your instrument. That language belongs to the wellness industry and Instagram reels selling you green juice.

I still have options now: I could book a gig, I could do another function, I could put together a recital programme. I hold an unchecked list of every recital series in Scotland (highly coveted, I must say). The options haven’t disappeared. They’ve just become options for other people.

My own solution is to look back to the musical things that make me feel whole rather than productive. Slipknot over Scriabin kind of thinking. Back to traditional music, to music that sounds like where I’m from rather than where my career is supposed to be going. I can at least imagine I’m still in the Lismore hearing a trad band in the corner. No sonatas on the stand for now. I’m not looking for a sound to play. I’m looking for a reason to play.

There’s a sculpture on the road out to Tighnabruich. Just the wooden frame of a boat hull, sitting on a hillside. It’s still clearly a boat. You can see exactly what it was built to do. But it isn’t going anywhere. It’s structure without purpose.

The Ark of Argyle was built by David Blair

I saw it years ago and it came back to me while writing this. That’s what it feels like. The shape of the thing is still there. The skill, the training, the muscle memory, the years of work. But the thing that made it move, the thing that made it mine, I have to find that again. Or accept that it might have changed into something I don’t recognise yet. An arc of my own. Bowie killed Ziggy.

For now, the honest answer is still the simplest one. When can you hear me play? I don’t know. Yuja came back as a conductor. It’s not for me right now. And for the first time, I’m not apologising for that.

I’m in Porto, seeking serious downtime from overcommitting myself to teaching, practice and writing Substack articles. And yet, here I am, writing another Substack article. Not much of a think piece this time. A simple mission for 5pm wine, bread and ham has left me so angsty I ended up thumbing my thoughts out to my phone, trying to articulate just how much I think overt taste leaves a bad taste.

A new phrase I’ve discovered to describe this place: “outward self-indulgence.” Allow me to explain.

In this bar, every customer is greeted with the same question: “what is your native tongue?”… yes, those exact words. To everyone.

You enter, you state your native tongue. Which, let’s be honest, is either English or Portuguese. But this question isn’t for the purpose of verbal communication. It’s actually for the neatly printed (…and laminated) A4-sized essay you’re given alongside the tiny menu. The essay, about the place, tells you some parable about encyclopaedias they have there. How they dug into the joint and discovered these old encyclopaedias in the walls. Amazing. I wonder how many laminated languages they have pre-prepared.

You’re invited to sit, read their essay about when they discovered old books, and then select from the menu which manner of wine bread and ham suffering you prefer to subject yourself to.

The menu has to be explained to me: origins, tastes, notes, quantity. I’ve spent a whole day indulging in culture at the Serralves museum. My blood sugar is low, I need a wine, bread and ham.

It’s time to order. Let me say it again, wine, bread and ham. Before you order though, they ask: “You read our story, right?” I’m about to be told how I should experience their wine, bread and ham. This is intellectual hazing - before harassing you with a rehearsed monologue about how you ought to read one of those dusty encyclopaedias they now have proudly displayed on the shelf whilst you eat.

I’ve got something better than your sad, dusty encyclopaedias. Maybe even trumping your pretentiousness with my David Foster Wallace book.

There’s jazz on. You can choose the CDs… “Change the music if you’d like, from a selection of jazz CDs.” (Why is jazz the Spotify - sorry, ‘CD’ - dialect of a pretentious blow-hard?)

This offers false hope. While you can change the CD, you’d be wrong to think you can change the sad pretentious vibe because guess what… it’s all jazz.

It’s always “cool jazz”, because here, music is for signalling rather than listening. This is a space to feel cultured. Mood over substance. As if there’s no where else in Porto offering wine, bread and ham.

There’s intentionally no WiFi, of course. But there are charging stations. Which you’re encouraged to use, keeping your phone out of reach while they force-feed you self indulgence. Don’t force-feed me to switch off; I happen to be drafting a Substack here because I too am a self-indulgent slob.

I’m even too self-aware to use my beautiful pocket notebook to write this. Now I have seen a mirror of myself in their behaviour. But the wine is good. Maybe they’ll ask me to put my phone down.

I hear a customer say: “I love the concept.”

This isn’t a concept. It’s a restaurant built where a few books used to live. And you best be sure to acknowledge it in practice.

It’s self-indulgence on display. And that is what’s making my skin itch. Not the indulgence itself—I’ll reiterate, their wine, bread and ham were some of the best I’ve had so far on this trip. But the way it’s performed. It’s curated perfection, rehearsed soliloquies, subtle pressures to participate in their prescribed, non-unique form of indulgence. And then behaving as if it’s a rare niche worthy of a postcard to remember them by… handed alongside the bill. Here’s a take: if you’re so unique and cool, why slide a postcard to me as “something to remember us by”?

This is theatrical self-indulgence. Not the quiet kind you might forgive, but the performed kind that needs your participation to exist. All hope is lost when you have commodified being present.

I should tell them I’m a classical musician by trade. I also make my living doing this. Except even worse—it’s the entire fabric of my own self-worth. Eugh.

Take Five just came on. The owner, who loves herself and her encyclopaedias, is humming along. Christ, I’ll order a bottle to get through this experience.

Forget the wine, the bread and the ham. I’m going sober.

Alright, patrons are real people. Let’s get that out of the way. They keep classical music funded. They are the prime demographic that can afford those £45 tickets and fall asleep mid-cadenza.

And we have to admit, the venues are gorgeous. Wigmore Hall in my view has the best acoustics in London for chamber and solo recitals. I enjoy the silent moments between pieces, the stillness of the space. “Music exists in between the notes” etc. These halls preserve tradition while simultaneously fixing a routine. You often practice to survive rather than communicate.

I took my girlfriend to Wigmore on Saturday to hear Mahan Esfahani play an all-Scarlatti programme on the harpsichord. She’s Italian. Her first comment wasn’t about the music, but the audience. Almost entirely over sixty. The woman in front of us looked as though she’d quietly died halfway through.

Classical musicians have talked for years about the ageing demographic of concert-goers. I’ve noticed it too. I joke with my students that they’ve nothing to fear from playing to old grannies in churches. And that’s mostly true—there’s almost always tea and coffee after.

But the experience itself felt curiously non-engaging. Aside from the Wigmore’s perfect acoustics I found myself laboriously reading a programme note that could have doubled as a doctorate application. The younger guys next to me were on their phones the whole time. Maybe looking up half the words in the note. Meanwhile we were being aurally bull-horned by Esfahani’s genuinely beautiful, sensitive attempts to convince us that Scarlatti is underrated and still matters.

The programme itself didn’t help. Scarlatti sat alongside Cantallos, José Cabanilles, Soler, and C.P.E. Bach, but in practice it felt clotted: four Scarlatti sonatas, then another composer, then another three or four Scarlatti sonatas, then another interruption. Any sense of narrative was buried under quantity.

There’s probably no faster way to alienate an audience than barging into their inbox weeks beforehand with four separate announcements of programme changes. You mean to tell me he’s playing K382 and not K69? Honestly.

More disparaging to the uninitiated… Scarlatti Sonatas are identified exclusively by K number. True scholars remember the three digits to identify their favourite Scarlatti sonata. We compare those digits at the interval as if that should mean something to anyone outside Club Wigmore.

All this builds a fortified barrier that says to the uninitiated outside that any sense of narrative cannot be deduced by listening alone. You could read the program note (Mahler shudders) if you fancied spending your Saturday night off on what might as well be an academic paper.

I should defend my own comprehension. It’s not that I don’t like Scarlatti, or the harpsichord, or Esfahani. I’m actually working on Scarlatti arrangements myself, so this definitely classifies as a business expense…both literally and spiritually. As I write, I’m listening to Ivo Pogorelich’s recording of K9 (if you know, you know). But I went into music to connect with people, not just the over-sixties patronage who forget their cough sweets every time they come to a gig.

There’s Another Kind of Performance

Meanwhile, it’s January. Three degrees. I’m on the Lioness Line at 7:30am, heading to teach my young students, carrying the question of which work matters more.

I’m preparing for a recital myself, though lately my performance work has been, by choice, limited to gigs with Live Music Now. When you play in a care home, nobody reads programme notes. There’s no routined silence. Someone might call out mid-phrase. Someone else might cry. The woman in the front row might have dementia and genuinely not remember you were there five minutes after you’ve packed up.

You want to feel exposed. Play a Bach Sarabande to someone who may not be breathing tomorrow.

In these encounters, the people in the front row aren’t there to perform the audience role. They’re just there. You discover whether that arrangement of K382 can actually do what you think it can. Whether your Schubert song speaks without the £45 ticket price. Performing in hospitals, care homes, ASN schools* reshape how you view the repertoire you play and how you prepare it. You stop preparing to survive the ritual and prepare to communicate. You treat that arrangement of Yesterday with as much consideration and care as you would a Bach Suite. Because in that moment, to that listener, it matters just as much.

*Additional Support Needs Schools in Scotland— the fact that in England they’re still called Special Education Needs deserves a post of its own.

A Non-Performative Audience

In my own practice, ultra-preparation for the stage creates a certain kind of musician. Technically immaculate, perhaps, but sometimes so insulated from authentic reaction that the performance becomes a demonstration rather than a conversation. In other words, I get so caught up in fingerings and digits that I forget there’s someone on the receiving end of all this suffering onstage.

Going to the people breaks that mould. Not because those audiences are “less sophisticated” (they’re not), but because their reactions are unmediated by institutional expectation. Be prepared for the possibility that an extra pillow in the haematology day bed will get more applause than the Scriabin Prelude you obsessed over for weeks. Be ready to upset a care home patient because you can’t play any Bruce Springsteen. A child in a school assembly will tell you immediately if you’re boring. Wigmore’s PR team won’t save you. You just have to get good at talking to people. Communicating.

A Perspective On What Matters

I don’t have an answer yet to which work matters more. The Scarlatti at Wigmore, performed with perfected craft for an audience that knows exactly what a K. number means? Or the lesson at 8am with a student who’s just discovering that their fingers can make a string vibrate? I try to sound poignant here, but my eyes still roll impatiently as I watch another child become fascinated by the mark left on their finger after pressing the fingerboard for the first time.

I know which one feels more urgent on a freezing January morning. And I know which one reminds me why I went into music in the first place.

Patronage keeps the art form alive. Taking one for the team, paying those £45 seats. Playing to people in all the messy, ungoverned, unroutined spaces where music still manages to matter. Preparing my students for their first-ever performance in front of a stranger in a small music hall built at the back of a 277-year-old independent school in North London… that’s what keeps me alive as a musician. (Though I may not feel it when it’s 3 degrees on the Mildmay Line).

So yes, play the concert halls. Respect the traditions. Honor the patrons who make it all possible.

But don’t forget to play for the people who’ve never heard of a K. number and never will.

They’re listening too.

Based on what Thoreau wrote in Walden, his choice is just as intentional as mine, although for very different reasons. Thoreau chose to escape society, I opted to join it. Somehow, over two centuries apart, and in radically different societies, I am asking the same questions as Thoreau, that is, on how to live.

“I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors concerning how to live.”

Despite having joined society, I work hard to keep it at bay. Waterloo is only 20-30 minutes by train. However, I am grateful that each time I visit the aptly-named civic battleground, I can retreat home to Richmond. Living close to London’s largest Royal park enables me to escape the feed and spend time in a field. Thoreau went to the woods to find truth; I go to Richmond Park to find a bit of silence between push notifications. Our versions of transcendence differ mainly in access to a 5G network.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I’ve seen how London commuters quietly thrust themselves onto trains before letting anyone off. How they scramble to be first through doors that haven’t even opened yet. I’m no better. Despite the short journey into central, I share the same compulsion to make haste for… something. I refresh my emails mid-journey and discover that Letterboxd has updated its terms of use. The rush of this kind of gratuitous knowledge feels, somehow, life-affirming — like being the first to step onto the train, first in line to work. It’s a Walden of the mind. Patterns that trap us while teaching us nothing. Thoreau noted how easy it is to settle for consumption over comprehension, for information that moves rather than matters.

“The inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways”

I wonder if we live lives of self-imposed hardship and then quietly normalise it. I know I have. I went to music school and genuinely believed that if my tendons weren’t inflamed after a day of practice, I clearly hadn’t practised hard enough. In London terms, enjoying the spoils of a global financial capital requires a similar bargain: a life of self-imposed hardship in service of things that never quite fulfil you. Londoners call it a rat race, and I’m now part of it too — sometimes you need to be fully immersed in something to understand what you’re missing. I am, after all, in this city to soak up its economic offerings, its entertainment, its excessive summer weather.

The London experience gives you a front-row seat to these thousand modern penances. The daily grind that promises fulfilment but delivers exhaustion. The way city life can make simple pleasures (quiet, space, greenery) feel like luxuries. I’m looking at the mile-long queue for the Hampstead pools.

“The finest qualities of nature, like the bloom of fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet, we do not treat ourselves, nor one another, thus tenderly.”

Ever tried ordering a coffee in London then six hours later order another in Glasgow? London has that effect on people. The career ladders, the relentless lining-up of lifestyle standards, it creates this social smog of bluntness. In Glasgow, the air is colder, crisper. It sharpens you up. You would think the dreich weather conditions would create a population of similarly snidey folk. Down here, we handle one another far less delicately. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the cabin in the woods is trending on Airbnb.

Thoreau and Londoners arrived at the same solution to productivity psychosis… escape the city and lock yourself in an isolated cabin. A nineteenth century retreat is now a twenty-first century coping mechanism. The problem is circular. A Walden of the mind. Trap ourselves in patterns of thought and behaviour in the same way that Thoreau trapped himself in that cabin. Except we get none of the clarity. How do you keep hold of what’s important and continue to exist in the neoliberal economic epicentre of global finance. How do you participate without being consumed.

“Civilisation has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.”

Thoreau takes a critical stance not only on society, but on the individual shaped by it. Personal accountability sits at the centre of his thinking (OG neoliberal here). We must find ways to maintain our sense of Walden even when our habitats are designed to pull us away from it. We can design smartphone apps that anticipate our needs, yet struggle with basic presence. We can engineer perfect climate control, yet bristle at natural weather. We can connect globally, yet feel isolated locally. Hence why I’m not convinced that the answer lies in more isolation.

It’s often overlooked that Thoreau never stayed at that cabin by Walden Pond for more than two years. To me, it’s telling. We can’t all become the Hermit of Treig. He never explains why, and perhaps that’s the point. There’s a lesson that’s easily missed, because it isn’t as easy to sell. To inject Walden into daily life. Touch grass without fleeing all else. To recover moments of quiet, slowness, and attention even when the BA flights from Heathrow roar overhead.

Touching grass is about maintenance.
It’s how you improve the inhabitant, not just the house.

Don't dismiss the trips to Walden. Just remember to bring some of the dirt back with you.

I tried all sorts: the Rubrik’s Cube, chess mastery, sudoku, filing my nails (despite onlookers). None have stuck.

I started to pass the Tube-time by becoming a Tube-reader, and recently Orwell made an appearance. But since this choice of pastime has been pitted by Meditations for the anxious mind, I am forced into sourcing something original. Something more aligned with my individuality complex.

Tube reading isn’t ideal anyway. I struggle to hold onto the words while the tannoy injects announcements into my head at an unnecessary decibel level. It’s getting harder to think these days. And that, in itself, is truly Orwellian.

📞📲🤳🗣️🔊

To block out everyone else’s noise, I curated my own special combination of earplugs worn under my over-ear headphones. TikTok’s, video calls, loudspeaker conversations. I sit proud of my layered media cancelling tech. Conveniently forgetting that I only know of these earplugs thanks to YouTube advertising. I am both a rebel and a victim in this regard… Orwell would’ve had a field day.

Unlike Tube-reading, Tube-writing welcomes interruption. The pauses and (“mind the”) gaps allow me space to consider. Mental white space is part of the Tube-writing process. It adds clarity to my points, even sharpens them. I can stop mid sentence, stare at a panicked Deloitte intern sat on the phone across the way, and come back stronger. Writing survives the noise.

If Orwell had a newsletter, he’d be here on Substack too, right? Besides, I need a space to offer my unsolicited venting about Why I Write—and why you should keep reading.

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six,” Orwell says “I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer.”

Touching. I can tell you that when I was five or six, writing (or reading) were definitely not on my radar. I was more concerned with Thomas (the tank engine) and Star Wars. In fact, I failed high school English and just about made it through my second attempt. I’m something of a late bloomer when it comes to literary skills.

Oddly enough, “between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four” instead of “abandoning this idea” like Orwell, I read… a lot. Alongside this new surge of literary enthusiasm, I wrote essays during my undergraduate years, and got A’s. Lots of A’s. I may not have been a polemicist tearing down the establishment like Orwell, but a decent academic writer nonetheless.

The praise from A’s got me invested. I’d like to think these marks were a result of my aptitude as an academic writer, and the countless hours of reading and study I put in to master it. As opposed to the possibility that the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s academic writing standards are a tad lower than those of the SQA Higher English marking scheme… Yeah, as if.

Regardless of aptitude, I am compelled to start a newsletter. As a freelance musician, I’m operating in a unique space, juggling multiple income streams and maintaining some sense of artistic identity in my own practice. Orwell offers the idea that some writers write due to sheer egotism. I prefer to believe it’s because I still have literary enthusiasm in me. But let’s be honest, a little ego still remains.

“His subject matter will be determined by the age in which he lives…”

Let’s not get carried away, I’m not here to fix the world one newsletter at a time. In this ‘Stack’ I will write about practice methods, teaching work and the general mess of modern music economy—what it means to be a freelance musician today.

I’m not here to rage against the machine, unless that machine is the TFL tannoy system. But I do feel a quiet pull to say something real. Something useful. What started as a few long-winded Instagram captions has bloomed into a fully-fledged essay draft. Ironic.

“I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages…”

If my writing is to have any purpose, it’s to pay attention. To resist purple passages. To find clarity even when it is wrapped up in a multi-layered ear defence setup on the Lioness Line. Somewhere beneath this noise cancelling system, I’m still trying to listen.

In school, I felt like the intellectual stuff wasn’t for me. I played guitar. I played rugby. that was enough. It wasn’t until later that I discovered I had the capacity to read and write. Orwell believed writing should stay engaged with the world, even if quietly. I want reading, writing, thinking to stay central to my life. Even when the world (and the algorithm) seem intent on reducing me to just another guy on the Lioness Line with no inner life.