From where I’m sitting I can see across the Mediterranean towards the hills of Sardinia. Far off on the other side of the bay a light is racing across the water. The wind is up. Early this morning three crows flew overhead in formation, calling as the air took them sideways. I heard the wish of their wings over the wind and their cawing as I attempted to climb the almond tree behind the house.

The tree urges caution, catching at my hair and t-shirt, and I contort my body to reach for the velvet jackets of its seeds, attempting to drop them into the basket below.

It’s scratchy and spiky. The tree’s twigs and branches are softer and more flexible the further you get from the trunk. I can reach up and bend those without causing too much discomfort to the tree, but to reach the highest almonds I need to somehow thread my body through the drier, sharper branches of its interior.

It bothers me when I miss the basket. Sometimes the wind gets them and blows them off course. It shouldn’t matter, but even doing something this simple my mind starts to compete with itself. I want to do it well, or I start imagining how impressed Marianne, our host, will be with the contents of the basket.

We’re staying with family on Chiara’s side, in Corsica.

I struggle with it sometimes.

Being a guest.

Being given so much it can make me miserable, wanting to give something back. Every time we come here I squirm. Everyone is so generous and the place so beautiful.

It takes time to acclimatise.

To the heat and the nature and the insect bites.

By the time I feel comfortable with all of it, usually it’s time to leave, and then I feel sad saying goodbye.

It’s a wonderfully ridiculous inner world, this personality. Sometimes I can watch it, the way you might watch fish in the water, and my heart throbs with a warm feeling of peace and contentment. I’d love to be able to do that more often, but it’s not so easy being human.

Tonight we sleep to the sound of the sea and cicadas.

The moon here is so bright that its light forms what the locals call the silver island. It shimmers like the scales on the belly of a fish catching the sunlight.

Tomorrow we’ll head back into the town and onto a bus to the car ferry to bring us back to the mainland. In a way it will be a relief from all of this beauty. The built world will close around us. We’ll be able to buy pastries and sit in cafes breathing in the invisible fumes of modern cars.

Sitting here, I know that moment will come, but it’s not now. I can leave it here, suspended in time. Maybe that’s one of the gifts of writing?

And the title for this week?

In my eagerness to offer any useful service, at dinner I asked in French if I might pick the almonds from the tree. My heart dropped at the perplexed looks on the French speakers’ faces. It’s a look that makes me cringe in the moment, but giggle later. The English word “almond”, pronounced with a French accent, sounds to French ears like their word for a German person.

Odd how no-one laughed.

I’d asked if I could pick the Germans from the almond tree. Which I did, wondering if the three crows were speaking a secret language too.

Which they were.

Definitely.

If I could but make some sense of it.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

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Dear friend,

Deep maroon, velvet skinned, a split peach’s golden scarlet flecked innards are laid open. Lying on a pallet of its brothers and sisters it was cut this morning in one swift drag of the knife. Its pitted heart exposed so passing crowds can see with their own eyes how good the peaches are.

I’m carrying the bags for Betty, Chiara’s mum.

My Italian although improving is still blissfully rudimentary so I feel cut loose from the hustle and bustle of the market, in a bubble of my own, free to float and take in the sights and sounds and sensations.

The owner of the knife which sliced this morning’s peach greets each of her customers with the same placid unwavering attention. She has her dark hair tied back in a pony tail. Strands of fringe plaster to her forehead. We were late out of the apartment and it’s getting hot. The split peach is sweating and its flesh is beginning to wither and pucker the edges of its velvet skin. We’re like fish teeming amongst coral, except occasional laughter breaks out, sunlight pouring upon a child or proper old friends delighting in each other’s sight.

I don’t need to understand what’s being said. It’s theatre, but the best kind.

The actors are so rehearsed the play makes itself. We’re all master improvisers when we think no one is watching.

Betty’s face says she’s not impressed, I suspect it’s the price. Everything’s more expensive here too, but at least the fruit and veg taste good, straight from the producers.

The absence of language frees me from the burden of choice. There’s not a soul here interested in me and my preferences. Betty’s not going to be asking my opinion on which produce is the best.

Invisibility creeps up on you as the years roll by, but at the market the spotlight is reserved for the elder women. It’s their custom that counts here.

When Betty’s done the bags are full of crisp brown paper sacks loaded with the ingredients for the delights that will come out of Betty’s kitchen over the next few days.

We try to go for a coffee but the usual coffee shop is closed for the holidays so I suggest Betty waits on the street while I take the bags up to the apartment and we find another place. She agrees and says something that could either mean she’ll wait outside the bank or a bench.

Betty’s going through some challenges. We’re here supporting as best as we can.

I can’t stop thinking about that split peach. The one that got chosen.

Will it get eaten at the end of the day or thrown away?

A photo we’ve hung on the wall for her. It’s collage of family moments. I look at it as I’m parking the bags.

She’s maybe eight years old. In a starched pinafore dress, sat bolt upright in a school room. Pencil in hand she’s beaming down into the camera.

Split peaches.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

We’re resting our aching bodies on great slabs of rock, two miles above sea level, perched on the bed of what was once a great Alpine glacier. Eating sandwiches.

Beneath our feet, black ice is melting, pouring down the mountainside in torrents. When the last of the ice melts, and if no rain comes, there will be no more water up here. So I’m told over dinner at the mountain refuge where we’d slept the previous night, by a French guy with a pot belly and Harry Potter glasses. There is so much water up here now it’s almost impossible to imagine, but it’s ice melt. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

What I’d imagined as a fairly difficult walk in the lower Alps turned out to be a three-day hike across the high mountain passes. We started in Italy, and by the end of the first day we’d walked for seven hours and climbed to two thousand metres. My legs almost gave out, and I fell, grazing my palms and right shin on the rocks, with the first mountain refuge in sight. Above us young ibex butted heads at the edge of a sheer cliff face. Each clash echoed like a giant hollow wood block around the peaks and the valley below.

The sandwich at the end of the world is a pretty poor affair, wilting in its cellophane wrapper but, nevertheless, most welcome.

It had been made by the owner of the French refuge where we stayed on our second day - a stranger experience, in contrast to the warm, helpful welcome of the Italian refuge.

Her place was Dickensian in comparison. When we tried to order a packed lunch for the next day, it was a flat no. We’d broken her rules by forgetting to order the sandwich when we booked in.

It took some effort on my part to remember the rules of kindness. If kindness can have rules, then it would be “leave no one out.”

“Don’t you have any food?” she asked in English.

“We’ve two energy bars and half a packet of crisps.”

I expected the laying out of our predicament to make a difference, but no. It was impossible for a sandwich to be made under the circumstances because she would have to cut the bread and cheese. My French isn’t amazing, but that was definitely the reason she gave, before deciding, as far as she was concerned, the conversation was over, and disappearing into a kitchen - which Chiara knew to be full of delicious food. Being Italian, she has a nose for these things.

My ego mind hardened to a tightly brittle point. We’re playing some kind of power game, which makes no sense up here where everyone has so far been incredibly helpful. I can feel my heart hardening, and a part of me prepares for a battle of wills.

It takes a bit of effort, but I opt for kindness.

Chiara orders a couple of teas, which we drink on the balcony of the refuge, taking in the astonishing view of the glacier-fed valley below. I return the empty cups and can sense our host moving around in the kitchen. I half pop my head around the door and say merci.

I’m gone before she can see me. I don’t want to make contact, but I feel something pass between us, and it’s no huge surprise when she changes her mind about the sandwich we’re eating at the end of the world. It feels like that when you’re sitting in a melted glacier in a t-shirt, worrying if you’ve enough sun protection, listening to the roar of the ice melt surging down the mountainside.

And yet.

Between the rocks are mosses and delicate purple and blue flowers.

And butterflies.

Symbols of transformation.

And even to my surprise, at over three thousand metres, a dandelion seed.

Like a white feathery cloud floating past, so that it stops me in my tracks.

Till next week.

Love,

Mikey

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There’s a cool breeze after a summer storm, sweet relief from the intense heat. We’re listening to Elvis on my laptop as Chiara’s mum potters around the kitchen. Elvis has moved into Heartbreak Hotel. 1977 was the first time the impossible happened, at last, in my young world. We had Hound Dog on thick, heavy 78 vinyl. I listened to it over and over, resting my jaw on the old portable record player we inherited when Mam’s stepmother died.

You could say Elvis got into my bones.

He’s why I picked up a guitar. Realised boys could move.

And then he was gone, and I knew it was true. He was dead. He hadn’t faked it and run off to escape Colonel Tom. Rock gods are mortal, just like the rest of us.

It’s greener here than the London we left yesterday. The heat is baking, but storms bring relief. The parched parks and wilting trees back home conjured up dystopian fantasies in my mind. For the first time, I worried about the trees, like in Blade Runner. What if the trees die?

Walking on the marshes last week, we came across a thrush. It seemed to have lost its sight, walking straight up to us on the ground. We tried to give it water from our flasks, but it hopped off towards some discarded melon. There’s water in that.

I hope it survived.

It seems like there’s been less birdsong recently, so it’s a relief to see swallows play above the river, or hear the cooing of a wood pigeon in the near distance.

This summer feels like we’ve crossed a boundary. The autumn will come, and with it rain, and we’ll forget for a few months until the heat returns.

I’m glad to say the fields are still green here in North Italy. It’s a relief of green. And down by the River Lea back home, where the water table feeds parts of the marsh.

It was 1977 when we had that famous heatwave and drought. The year we lost Elvis. The death of the American dream. The one we were sold, where everyone could have more of everything. As much as you wanted, as long as you worked for it.

Look how it ended for the King.

But that was more stuff.

Cars and planes and bling.

I’m seeing a future where we have more, but it’s maybe what Elvis was dying for.

Where the birds have enough water to drink and the grass is green and the young trees full of hope.

Less stuff.

More substance.

It breaks my heart and fills it in equal measure to listen to those old tunes. We can pine for a lifetime long gone, just as much as we can know it’s no good for us anymore.

Till next week.

Love,
Mikey

A lady on the platform at King’s Cross asks me for the time. We’re waiting for a Circle line train west.

I’m heading to Paddington to catch a train to speak with Mattias from Campfire Stories for the next series of Where to Next?

It’s quarter past ten, by my old watch give or take a minute.

“Thank you,” she says and turns slowly, as if she’s protecting something vulnerable and delicate. She could have a fledgeling cupped in her hands nestled close to her heart.

She turns back.

“Oh, there’s a clock up there. I didn’t see it. They used to have it there.” She points to the information board where the trains are announced in tiny yellow ping pong balls.

She’s right.

They moved it.

It’s 10:17 precisely.

“Are you on time?” I ask.

I used to wither at the onset of small talk about the time and the weather, but now I know it as invitation, a silver thread to something deeper.

“I’m visiting a friend in hospice, been putting it off for years. I don’t know what to say. She’s been let down by all of the people who were supposed to care for her. They warned me she won’t know who I am.”

“Dementia?”

“No, she’s fevered, seeing things.”

I notice the box of sweets. She has the handle of a gift bag looped over her wrist. She’s the bones of a bird.

“Even if she can’t say it, she’ll know you’re there” I offer, and I mean it. I know it’s true. I feel the energy between us. The familiar rush of it round my body.

She turns and boards the tube carriage, for a moment I consider if the conversation is done and know that it is.

We board through different doors. I see her sitting lost in thought as we’re carried along with the others.

Who can know the stories in that carriage?

Just one moment

In the inconceivable tale of us all.

Till next week.

Love Mikey

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Having one foot in a shoe and the other in a clog, is Chiara’s rough translation for an Italian phrase that means more or less what it’s like to have your attention pulled in more than one direction at once. Or when you hamstring yourself.

A shoe that doesn’t fit. Too tight and so badly worn the water gets through and the clog the wrong size too. How much fun is that?

Friday this week, youtube shorts got hold of me until I came to my senses by counting from one to six. I don’t know why it was six, but by the time I got to it I hit the small x on the tab on my laptop and came up gasping, like I’d dived too deep and almost run out of air. Drowning in click bait the algorithm knows I’ve a taste for. Tommy Shelby being unflappable. Smoking a fag and staring down a guy who doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. The guy draws a gun and Tommy takes a hand grenade out of his coat pocket, pulls the pin and drops it inside the guys shirt.

Utter none-sense. That’s the kind of stuff where my mind can end up. The algorithm mimics the wandering, unfocused mind. One thing after the other.

There’s no joy in it. Scrolling. Like you’re trapped and falling. A digital well, dried up and empty of life. Not even a frog to kiss at the bottom.

One foot in a shoe, the other in clog.

It’s so different from the fragrance of wisteria blossom floating in to the kitchen on the warm summer breeze. Or the shushing of the wind through the leaves of the giant trees drinking deep on the banks of the river. The salt earth and mud, and tiny fuzzy moorhen chicks darting between the lush green reeds.

Breathing consciously, shifting from one sense to the next. Feeling into the muscles and bones, watching the dogs joyfully joining them in the moment. Sun burning the backs of arms, beating down in the crown of my head. In one place, intact and alive.

Lassoed by our own attention.

Prisoners behind unlocked doors.

Better to walk barefoot on the earth.

Than one foot in a shoe

And another in a clog.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

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The garden this morning was calm and still. A slow Sunday. Early bees and butterflies quivering on lavender blossoms. Wisteria waving in the breeze. Cooler than before, the air somehow thick, almost creamy like a balm.

Watching how green bottle flies join the bees in the oregano flowers is maybe the best thing I did this week. Not the best, but the image stands out in my mind. Surprising how little I know even about the smallest most familiar patch of the world.

Stay curious. Know that you’ll never know everything and that’s okay - that’s what I took from listening to Dan’s interview with Jay Griffiths. It’s wild (forgive the pun) listening to Jay in conversation with Dan. She must be one of the most original and influential writers alive today. The radio show often feels like a dream to me. By talking to so many fascinating people a view of the world is forming that’s far from doom and gloom. It’s more of a renaissance.

At the same time that we’re exposed to more and more frightening news, there’s a growing movement towards reconnecting with what is good in humanity. Our creativity and the value of our relationships and friendships.

I’ve devoured Douglas Rushkoff’s book “Team Human”. Particularly I’ve learned that the quality of our relationships is the most valuable and impactful aspect of our lives.

To be rich in friendship is true tangible wealth.

I’m missing Chiara. She’s working abroad. But I do have some of our friend’s dogs for company. Dippa’s here for a couple of nights and Zara’s now fully recovered and had all of her stitches removed. Then there are the cats.

Little Maisy surprised me last night, peering over the edge of next door’s extension. Her eyes dark pools in the last of the day’s light. A crescent moon behind her against the Wedgwood blue night sky.

The World Cup Final is about to start.

Tom Cruise is standing in the centre of the field making a speech. I turned it off and came back here to write to you. I met him once coming out of a party beneath a Kebab shop in Shoreditch.

It’s an odd life.

But not all doom and gloom.

Here’s to rebirth.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

The evening is cooler at last, so the house has lost its oven quality.

Years ago the change came upon me, so that where I loved the cold cloudy northern skies, now I’m as happy in the sunshine. Even so forty degrees is frightening. We’ve passed the point where climate change is a future thing happening somewhere else. To others.

People are talking, their voices floating over from distant gardens. The high road roars like a river. Young guys are out full throttle on their motorcycles. Across the way a neighbour speaks to a friend, they’ve set their mobile to maximum volume. It’s got that serrated metallic edge to it.

A house fly is keeping busy. Buzzing around.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week. Turning things over in my mind until I accidentally drop them and they break open. What seems locked and obscure swings free and obvious. The effort is in staying long enough with the tension of not knowing without jumping to easy conclusions. I’m thinking about the butterfly story. The one where a misguided helper slits the cocoon of the struggling butterfly. But without the struggle to break free of their cocoon, the butterfly’s wings don’t develop the strength it needs to fly.

It’s a pitiful image. White butterfly wings flailing and desperate on the ground.

All of that time in the dark.

If only their rescuer had heard the story in advance. Let nature run her course. We need our time in the cramped dark. Out of the dark we emerge transformed. We become someone changed. Renewed. As different as a butterfly to a caterpillar.

These times are asking something of us.

Butterflies pressing our wings against the leathery cocoon of the past.

I don’t pretend to a great plan. Just this.

When we show up as ourselves. Just be who we are, in the spirit of friendship we can change the world.

I’m stopping using the word if.

Just keep saying when. I heard Sir Tim Smit the founder of the Eden Project on Do Radio say when you use when, it takes a few months of it and then other people start to say when and then it happens.

Listening to Dan’s kids telling me about the moon and books and rainbows and mermaids and unicorns and invented worlds and science. Wide eyed and innocent and utterly lovely, we’ve that inside of us too.

When you hang out with kids you know where the responsibility for their futures rests. It’s a collective responsibility.

When we learn to show up as ourselves in the spirit of friendship.

When we learn to share resources.

When peace is the norm.

That’s our destination.

I’m learning that to be human means to be social.

When we connect we connect to shared intelligence.

Shared intelligence, through inspiring loving conversation leads toward higher intelligence. That’s evolution.

We’ve no choice but to evolve.

“I keep wondering about swallowing the sun” says Dan’s youngest.

I know what she means.

“I guess it would tickle a bit” I reply.

To be so full of light.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

When we’re surrounded, you could say swimming in fear and worry and doubting even if there is a future we’d wish for.

Loving what’s here now could be a radical act. Rebellious in the face of fear.

What if our greatest resources of safety and security are in our capacity for human kindness and love for one another?

The taste of the air in our mouths.

The coolness of water soothing parched lips. Watching a bee clambering through lavender. A white butterfly lands on the rocks in front of me. Claps its wings three times and vanishes.

We can be loving even for the ones who have been driven mad by desire. Knowing as we do the sticky mess of our own wants and needs.

Love for our own wounded selves. Doing the best we can.

Radical love. Love without merit or reason.

An act of will.

Beautifully defiant.

Till next Week

Love

Mikey

It’s a little lonely inside. Chiara went to Florence today by air and then caught a train to Arezzo to work for the next month. I’ve got the dogs for company. Zara is almost recovered from her accident in the woods.

The last of her stitches come out on Tuesday this week. Sonni will go home in a few days too, so I’ll need a routine to structure my days. No Chiara and no dogs, just me and my books and calls.

I’m feeling especially tender on account of a cracked tooth that broke while eating a banana with some yoghurt, forcing a long needed visit to the dentist, except I’ll have to find one because I’m not feeling so confident about the last one I saw.

She seemed nervous and stressed, plus the filling she gave me hurt for ages afterwards like it was packed too tight, and the other repair she did broke off the next day.

But needs must, and the tooth’s sharp on the edge of my tongue.

I avoid medical appointments unless they are forced on me, an inherited attitude from my Dad and Grandad. It’s a mix of genuine fear spiced with a dash of bravado.

When I was young, like a lot of young people, I was convinced of my own physical invincibility and I didn’t mind going to the doctors or the dentist. It was just something the adults made you do. It never occurred to me that one day I’d actually need some help looking after a body under the side effects of time. You just imagine old people are a different species, born that way.

It’s not gonna happen to you.

I looked after Scott’s kids on Saturday. Mercan told me about an ancient person who was in their thirties. She’s not yet twelve herself. Though we talk about her mam and dad’s life before she was born, it doesn’t really mean anything to her.

We’re all funny like that.

On the way home there were lots of us melting in the heat wave, but also melting in time. Ever so slowly. So we don’t notice.

Like our neighbour’s sausage dog. You’ll see him twice a day on his daily tour. He’s so old he looked bleached. Slow sniffing, taking his time while his humans tread softly beside him.

He’s so joyfully rubbed out, it’s a blessing every time I see him.

A dog bleached by time.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

PS — The first series of Where to Next? ends Monday: Dan and I on Guy Standing and basic income. Already lining up guests for series two.

It’s the summer solstice. The longest day of the year.

Did you see the moon? Sliver of silver.

I’ve a funny feeling inside. Today I sent in to our producer Louise, the final show of my first series with Where to Next? for Do Radio. It will air in a couple of weeks. My run concludes with two shows about basic income and a conversation between myself, Dan and Professor Guy Standing.

In the second show I mention a dinner I had a few weeks ago with some close friends from college. Every month we each put £25 into an account. When there’s enough money in to pay for hotels and the like, we get together and spend it.

At the last dinner it struck me that two out of the four had children attempt to take their own lives, and at some point or another all of the kids had struggled with anxiety of some sort.

You could call anxiety not feeling safe.

That’s enough reason to reorganise society so that everyone feels held and every one feels like they belong. I hope you’ll catch the show from this Monday 22nd. Guy makes the case for basic income better than anyone. He’s been making it since the eighties.

In the first of the two shows I quote my friend Scott. His wife Suzanna calls him Nostradamus for his ability to see into the future. Years back he told me there’ll be generations asking their grand parents, “Grandma, what was it like when you had to have a job?”

As in a job doing something you don’t like for someone who doesn’t like you.

Last night Chiara and me went round Scott and Suzanna’s. The conversation got me thinking about the next ten years and what to do with them. What can you do with ten good years?

I’m thinking I’ll go on making Where to Next? and somehow we’ll keep holding conversations that speak about the future we want the kids of today, and future generations to inherit. Somehow we’ll walk beside them into the uncertain future we keep pointing to as if it is not also our own, and they must be the ones to fix it.

It’s all up for grabs.

We, collectively made all of this stuff up.

What was made.

Can be unmade.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

Dear friend

By the time Sunday evening rolls around this is pretty close to the way I’m feeling. It’s a photo I took of a box that got delivered to our house at the start of the week.

We’ve a counter top beneath the kitchen window that provides a decent approximation of a studio backdrop.

The more I look at the image the less I feel the need for words.

Better to sink to a deeper place within where the chaos of the world is neither welcomed nor denied. The world breathing, tree-lunged same as me.

Expanding and contracting.

I’ll consult the wind.

Zara had an awful accident today chasing squirrels.

We heard an ungodly screech from the direction where she’d gone off hunting in the undergrowth. I had Sonni’s lead in one hand, a tote bag over my shoulder and a stinking poo bag in the other. Chiara took Sonni’s lead from me and I ran towards the sound to see Zara frozen with one paw held off the ground.

I couldn’t make out what was wrong. Got down on my knees, checking her paws - I found blood. Then I noticed she had a bloody flap of skin and white fur hanging off her chest. I could see the bare muscle underneath.

She’s okay now.

We got her to vets at Pets at Home who did an amazing job stitching her back together before the shop shut.

Driving to the retail park with an injured dog through droves of cars and litter. “This is what the end of the world looks like.” I say to Chiara. But it’s the end of a world, not the world.

We’re moving towards something else.

Something better, more grounded.

Sane.

The staff in the shop were so full of love and helpful.

Zara at home now sleeping off the general anaesthesia. It was something sharp in the undergrowth, but we don’t know what. Like a boat hull scraping a reef.

The box in the picture you can end up feeling that way sometimes.

Keep going.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

Remember the family of swans from a few weeks back?

The ones with seven cygnets in the water and one riding on the back of the mother swan.

This week their dad, papa swan got caught up in the reflection of the polished stainless steel pump housing by the side of the canal.

It houses the engine boaters use to pump out the slurry from their onboard septic tanks, which is a polite way of saying it’s a giant hoover for piss and shit.

I went into the canal side cafe to get a tea and some of Steve’s home made bread pudding. He told me he’d called the wildlife trust but they told him there’s nothing any one can do about it.

Whenever he catches sight of his reflection, he comes out of the water for hours at a time. Preening and looking at himself. In the background his wife and kids are swimming away looking back at him and my heart lurches.

I’ve Sonni with me, so I hold him back. He’s way too curious about the giant bird. Plus I notice there are now only seven cygnets. The smallest most likely didn’t make it. My memory serves up a picture of his bright black eyes and ruffled feathered head poking up between mam swan’s elegant cocooning wings. Who needs movies when you have the detailed dramas of the canal side?

It’s been a stormy June, but I want to sit outside. The sky is muffled up in soft grey dampness. I’ve Sonni pulling on his lead and the bread pudding on a floppy paper plate in one hand, and a cup of tea with the teabag swimming in a glass mug in the other. The sun comes out so that it quickly gets uncomfortably hot, so I take off my thick blue coat, only for it to suddenly blow up a gale and start to spit.

I move under the eaves of the cafe to get out of the rain, leaving my bread pudding on one of those round colourful collapsible tables to go back for the coat and the tea.

While my back’s turned, Sonni, who’s never off lead in public, drags me over and grabs the whole of the bread pudding off the table.

This all happens in slow motion.

Without a thought in my head other than “that can’t happen” I can feel my hand is down past the dog’s tongue flinging lumps of sultana and orange peel dog poison out of his throat. Flinging them on the floor. It causes a scene inside the cafe as I get every last bit out of a stunned Sonni.

Neither of us expected it of the other.

I’ve never seen him snatch anything off the table and I’ve never thrust my hand between his mastiff jaws.

“He could’ve had my hand off” I say to one of the regulars who comes to sweep the bits of pudding off into the bushes by the side of the cafe.

Steve gave me another slice for free, which I ate as me and Sonni struggled home in a storm that hit with pouring rain and wind for a full five minutes before blowing itself out and the sun coming out to scald us again.

That poor swan, I’m thinking.

Mesmerised by my own image.

Till next week

Love Mikey

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“We’ve known each other for forty years,” says a voice to my left.

Nearly forty years, I’m thinking.

But it’s true. I’m occupied with my fourth glass of Pimms and a plate of fish and chips, which means I’m only vaguely aware of the conversation.

We’re a few years off four decades since we met at college, on courses we didn’t have to pay for with loans.

I’m sitting with friends in a pub garden in Kew. We have a fun fund that we all pay into each month. When it’s got enough money, we meet up and spend it together.

Not that we see each other so much, or even call, but they’re friendships that pick up as if no time passes in between. That’s good luck. To have been blessed with enough of a foundation to build lasting friendships upon.

It angers me that the young of today face frightening levels of debt to have what we had granted us. It’s wrong. The pressure on young people to fit in and the uncertainty they face about making their way in the world, carving out a space to grow and discover who they are. Everyone needs that.

If my time to study was now, would I take on the loans? I can’t say.

My parents would have told me to do what I think best and support me the best they could. But knowing what I know now about the way debt hollows out your sense of well being, I think I’d miss out.

Then I’d not be sitting at the table with these people who’ve been here for one another through the changes of the years. Jobs, and kids and passing of our parents and grandparents.

We used to wonder if we’d still know each other when we got old

Well, we’re now those older people we used to wonder about.

All I know is the body changes, and I’m more at peace with myself than when my body was younger.

And I want to do something to help the younger generations.

We owe it to them.

How we do that I don’t know yet.

But it’s a question we all need to talk about.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

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Sonni arrives for a month. He comes on Tuesday. At the end of his stay I will be heartbroken to say goodbye. His owners understand. They always stay for a cup of tea and a chat, but the time comes and we must part. Just sitting here, with the double kitchen doors open onto the garden. Past eight in the evening, a neighbour’s kids are playing basketball, laughing and thudding, the heavy ball crashing into the wooden slats of their fence. Our wisteria in full leaf trembling on the soft evening breeze. Conjuring up the sadness of a future parting I feel it as if it were happening right now.

What if the future is the stories we tell now?

We tell ourselves stories and then we act them out.

If you search for meaning you find where it is.

Making meaning real, right here inside of you.

And maybe being afraid of our power is sensible. The story can break your heart. It can take a long time to mend. Could be so long you get scared it never will.

But then you have beautiful creatures like Sonni.

Unfiltered love.

The sun and the moon are full of love.

and all of Earth.

Stars.

Oceans.

Sky.

Rivers.

The carbonated spring water clinging to the sides of an IKEA glass.

It’s not about giving advice, or if it is then the advice is for myself.

Because Sonni can’t be left alone, I’ve been extra active in meeting people for Where to Next? I met two guests this week, Andy Ayim and John-Paul Flintoff. Maybe I don’t say so much about what we talked about. Just that we maybe all could benefit from recording our conversations and listening back.

You hear so much richness on the second or third listen, it makes you wonder how much of the wealth of life might be passing us by each day.

There was a moment when a 14 year old John-Paul’s art teacher told him that living as an artist was hard. John-Paul didn’t hear that.

He heard “you can’t be an artist.”

Eventually life forced him to become what he already was.

Walking with Andy through the streets where he grew, telling me the stories that shaped him. Story suddenly everywhere -in the bricks and kerbstones and trees and the concrete and the underpass and the cars on the drives and the new builds and the change - all of it -meaning something because we tell ourselves stories and we tell each other and we play the parts we cast ourselves in and we can change that but only through one another.

Then I spent the week listening to Mike and Shuna Dickson sharing their story and those of the people they’ve helped over the years. They were taught by Desmond Tutu that we are only human in our relationship with each other and all living beings.

Ubuntu.

I’m realising the stories are wrapping themselves around me. The way Tom Blue Wolf told me they would. Language is the fabric of our culture.

How we speak and think and act matters.

Our agency is right here inside of us and our voices matter.

The stories we tell weave the clothes we walk in.

It’s daunting and should be so, to put this in words. This world. The effort it takes to free our minds and to keep them free. One step back is to turn off the blaring voices that have bought our attention with cheap trinkets.

More and more I wish not to be entertained unless it’s the trojan horse of myth and music and dance, come to shake me from my sleepiness.

There are rumours flying through each story of a new world. Not one we’re hearing from the major platforms. It’s not the story the tech bros want us to buy and it’s not coming from divisive forces -it’s something else - it’s the stories we tell, it’s the ones we cultivate - it’s our unforgetting, our remembering.

It’s us.

We tell stories.

Then we act them out.

One step.

At a time.

Till next week

Love Mikey

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When did my calendar become such an invasive part of my day to day life? It’s colour coded and shared with some so we don’t have to have back and forth on dates, but still I long for a day without looking at it.

Longing like a river.

A phrase picked up from Nathalie Nahai, whose conversation airs soon on Do Radio.

By the river this afternoon Chiara and I stopped on the grassy bank by the footbridge. A pair of swans living on the Lea graciously grant us audience. They allow us to rest in their presence, listening to the wind in the high tree tops.

Feeling the breeze on our faces and the backs of our hands. Thoughts slowing like the water.

You can think you know what a swan is by naming it. That’s a problem with language. You say swan and move on, failing to marvel at the muscles in the neck, the extraordinary stacking of the vertebrae. Buoyant brilliance of feather and beak and gleaming spot of light. The male fixes his gaze on us. Protecting his one love, he swims between us and her. It’s true they mate for life, only divorcing if they remain childless.

But they’re not childless.

Today they’ve drawn a crowd. Seven fluffy grey powder puff cygnets in the water, and on the back of the mother, nestled in the white cocoon of her wings, another cygnet rides. Comically their head pokes out, sweeping the scene, then ducking back under cover.

It’s probably the least robust of the cygnets, not yet having developed fully waterproof down. Kept safe and warm, tenderly held under mother’s feathers, it stands a chance of survival.

My longing now is to be that cygnet.

Behind the swans, on the raised bank of the distant reservoir, a piebald pony breaks from grazing and watches us. Behind it the scudding bruised May clouds. The pony watches us for a long time.

I find myself wondering if it can read my thoughts.

Till next week

Love Mikey

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Over the last few months there were times I wished I’d said no. Not a good idea. You’ve got too much on. Don’t do it.

But both of us, Chiara and me — we love a good idea. So it seemed a good idea for Chiara to run a May workshop in London, despite all her teaching and family commitments.

But then whenever a group comes together to practice a masked 16th century theatre form, satirising the human ego — you tend to attract the most wonderful groups of humans.

The early morning worry. The trap door moments when you think no-one will come, seem a reasonable price for so much human warmth and community. There were discussions about cancelling but with people booking from overseas, that didn’t feel like an option.

The only way was to make it work and I’m happy we did.

On Saturday morning Chiara ran Natural You. To warm the group up.

We lead one another around the space through touch. One with eyes open, the other eyes closed. Without sight you’re forced to pay attention to your body. Slow and hesitant at first, you build trust and with trust comes freedom.

You feel like you’re flying.

Then we become counter weights for each other. You had one person on either side of you holding you by the arms. You could fall forwards, sideways or backwards and your partners would halt your fall. To be supported that way felt like my body was melting. Then we practiced jumping. The two lifting the one up high like indulgent uncles playing lift.

The joy of it.

Laughing out loud as we took turns to melt and fly.

Each one of us found ourselves asking for “one more time.”

We could have played that way for hours.

Colet House has been a home to whirling dervishes and artists and mystics and meditators since the 19th century. I love it the way I’ve rarely loved a spiritual space- because no single path owns it. All of them are welcome. All of them, to me, are real.

The stairs shimmer as if someone pressed tiny crystals into the granite. Margot Fonteyn practiced on the same wooden floors we played on. Somewhere in these corridors, Ouspensky turned a door knob, brushing shoulders with us still.

The way the steps are worn and there are secret rooms smelling of incense.

So I’m glad I said yes. And now I want to do more.

More workshops.

More groups.

More community.

We’re both that kind of tired where you feel spent and filled at the same time. The promise of melting into bed is a delight. I’m thinking of it now as I type.

Like the last few steps before you reach the peak of the climb and look out over the valley to the shining blue coast beyond.

And I know we’ll do more workshops.

Because it will seem like a good idea.

Till next week

Love Mikey

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I worried that I’d messed up my ear drums. Possibly permanently. Friday at Oslo in Hackney, the sweat soaked shamanic pounding of House of All’s shaking my spine as their bespectacled lead guitarist sliced through each ear drum membrane with the wire of his wah pedal. The singer signalled from the stage to cut the high frequencies, but the throbbing surging pounding breaking shimmer of the band left the sounds of surf in both ears. I figured I’d been through worse and Rock n Roll exacts its toll. How else can you be immersed in an ocean of sound? House of All are a band you have to experience live. Their albums are tame in comparison to their live shows.

Next day descending into Porto crammed into the tortuous seats of a Ryanair flight, the change in pressure added the thumb screws so both ears ached, making me grumpy and uncommunicative. Banging my head on the open overhead storage locker. Using the mf*cker word to release the pressure and claw back some space. To say stay away I’m done listening to my fellow creatures chatter. By passport control a storm wind howled in my left ear. Chiara held her nose demonstrating how to blow them out and I saw dented speaker cones in my mind’s eye. They squealched and fuzzed like an FM dial but by the time we picked up our hire car, the fear had passed. Maybe permanent damage had been done, but nothing fatal. I could still hear well enough to work out the sat nav.

Into our two hour drive to visit Jack and Melissa, it’s dark by the time we’re on the empty motorway. The sat nav shows us the rivers in muted blues, silhouettes of trees wave encouragingly from the sidelines. I’m aware the land is speaking a language I don’t understand. Not yet. The roads speak of death. Shattered packages of fur flash by in the headlights. We hope they were not people’s pets. We’re as much part of the problem as everyone else. Flying, driving, connecting with our far flung family of friends. By the time we’ve listened to the Forest by the Cure I’m reassured hurtling through the dark into the wooded hills.

We’re staying in an old shepherd’s hut that’s now a guest cottage attached to the main house. In the morning Chiara wakes me and calls me outside. “Do you want to see something magical?” For a moment I think I’m looking at the ocean, but it’s the valley full of rolling morning mist. The air is clean and the water comes down from the mountain. We drink and we breathe.

Jack, our host, is keen for a slow Sunday. He can see we need time to let the hills do their work. Break up the rush of the flat lands and the concrete. He’s right. Even our afternoon walk is at a pace. Smelling the buds of lemon trees. An ant crossing the path. The skies darkening and the feeling of rain in the air. We ponder which path to take home. Do we retrace our steps or take a looping alternative. The alternative feels like a head decision, the known path comes from the guts. We make it home as the heavens open. The head path would have seen us soaked to the skin.

The skies wrap their chords around us and finally our hurtling slows to almost a standstill. We’re held and the moment rises and with it some peace. It’s too fast when you’re racing in our minds even if the things we race towards shine with promise. Too much in one day bleaches the sweetness out of the bones of the day.

Sipping brandy, before coming back to the shepherd’s hut to write, we watch Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in the Bucket List and cry and talk about what the future holds. There’s a scene where the two characters are told they’ll not see the mountain peaks till the weather clears next spring. Both men know next spring may come for neither of them. Next spring — I realise I’m taking for granted.

In the film the two men are sitting on top of the pyramids in Egypt. Morgan Freeman says the Egyptians believed you’d be asked two questions at the gates to heaven. Did you have joy in your life. And did your life bring joy to others.

An image flashes in my mind. Two kids in London, who Chiara has gifted places on her workshop this weekend, jumping for joy at the opportunity. It’s not what we get, but what we give. Thinking of their joy - those memories are their gift to us.

Till next week,

love Mikey

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The weather has turned, it’s light past seven in the evening and warm enough for a t-shirt outdoors this morning. Under mam and dad’s old garden parasol with its one broken arm, listening to the chuck chuck chucking magpies. One bird has become curious about us. Maybe it’s the moonstone I wear on my left index finger. Lately they’ve been hopping closer to the garden sofa, head tilted quizzically, sounding us out. I can feel their heart.

It’s just over a week since the sweat lodge with Tom Blue Wolf. The most obvious lasting effects are a changed relationship with the sun and the moon. On the Monday, waking up at home, the sunrise just catches one pane of the bedroom window, slanting golden across the floor. I felt the light before my eyes opened. The warmth of a dog was in the room, rousing my heart, which feels softer and less predisposed to armouring itself up against the world. The sun speaks to us, is curious about the life within, and feels male in its energy. A creature like ourselves. Truly a source of life. Later in the week, during daylight, I looked up — suddenly aware of being observed. I gasped in delight to see the moon, half melted in the powder blue heavens, looking into me. Shyly pulling at my body, touching my heart.

Everything feels alive, so it’s a wonder to me that anything ever seemed inanimate. Even a fly resting on my computer screen causes a surge of affection. The wind caressing my naked arms. Zara panting in the sun, stretched out on the wisteria blossom.

And then there’s the heavy energy of the high street. The shops with their narrow aisles, the plastic wrappers blowing into crud coated corners. Hot Bob chicken shop has been rebranded, bright yellow now, called Krispy Wings. I see the baby boy chicks on a production line being fed live into a stainless steel mincer. The girl chicks with their beaks cut, caged, force grown so their bones break. Beauty and the horror sit in my mind cheek by jowl.

I got mad at Chiara yesterday and it burned inside me like lava. We’ve both been dealing with care for family members — if you’ve experienced it you’ll have an idea of the immense pressures that can build up beneath the surface. I took myself off and thumped the bed cushions. Roared into a pillow, leaving a mouth shaped spit mark. It passed. I thought of my Dad and how he would become spiteful when his feelings were hurt, how it could go on for days, and smiled enough for healing to begin. I knew it would be hours, not days. The blessings of our generation is we have access to deeper self knowing.

From Jay Griffith I’m learning how the old stories and the songs of our ancestors were silenced. From Tom I’m learning how to bring them home.

Tom’s phrase all my relations is rooting itself in me. Growing down and tethering me to the earth. It feels ever young even if my body is not. There’s less fear in me and I’ve hardly given a thought to politicians. I doubt the future they envision will be the one we bequeath future generations. I just don’t see it. Not that anything is foregone, just my intention is for the visions inside me to blossom forth, not this hyper surveilled sickness.

I did once think there would be an end point to this adventure on earth. A destination to arrive at. I thought maybe I’d done a lot of work to unpick the conditioning running my world and that at some point the work would be done.

Now it looks much more like an endless curiosity play. Endless, expansive, fire and ice, feather and burning lead. Since the time with Tom I feel braver. More willing to stay open hearted.

And strangely less bothered about the projections of others.

Till next week

Love

Mikey

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We are mostly silent, eyes closed or watching pixels dance across our screens. Enclosed, shut up in rows at thirty-eight thousand feet. The sunlight bright and clear casts curved shadows on the bone-coloured plastic detailing of our giant metal bird, gorged — its cargo swallowed whole is our flesh and bones, but not our souls.

A flight attendant’s name badge reads ‘Mack’. He’s giving out miniature plastic bottles of Harrogate water. With each bottle he says thank you, his larynx as close as possible to the squeak of a teddy bear.

Once upon a time my inner traitor would have silently sniggered, told to quieten and show some decency, but there’s a warm soft wonder in my chest. Imagine the strength of a man with such a voice carving his life out of the ego of our world?

In a few hours Patrick and me will be in the spa town of Bad Sulza to meet Tom Blue Wolf. Tom will lead us through a sweat lodge ceremony in which Patrick tells me I’ll experience the sensation of dying. In the heat and the dark I’ll be forced to surrender — enclosed again, but this time in the lodge with the grandfather stones and Tom’s prayers.

It’s years since I spoke to my neighbour on a flight. I stopped, cold turkey, as if it were an indulgence I’d grown out of.

Now it’s the flight home, after the lodge.

The couple next to me tear into their bags of crisps making sucking, clicking mouth noises in their relish. I do the same when I’m home and no one is there to witness it. All the same, I reach for my ear buds.

I’ve not made eye contact with even one of my fellow passengers and yet the underlying intention for the sweat lodge was to connect to our ancestors. Tom says we each have at least twelve hundred living inside us.

From this altitude I feel everyone who’s ever lived must be related in some way to everyone alive today. All my relatives, as Tom names them — the two-legged people, the winged people, the plant people, the river people — and so it goes on in a great spiralling universe.

Stars and planets.

How could anyone be separate from any of it?

The pressure change pops my ear like someone changing the filter on a track.

Passport control on the way into Germany had taken over an hour. The new fingerprint systems are slow and there’s a shortage of people willing to trade their lives for a steady salary sitting in a box. Matching faces and data. Stamping books.

Or maybe it’s systems in decline.

Patrick said maybe it was an f-you to a British Airways flight coming out of the UK — our bird stuffed with ex-citizens.

All of them, in their blue uniforms, wearing guns.

We’d booked a later train than the one we could have chanced, knowing the German railways as we do now. Which meant we’d already missed Tom’s book signing, and staff from the ceremony site were waiting for us. Standing in that queue I wasn’t thinking about any of that, not really. I could feel the heat building. Three hundred people, two boxes, and a brown-skinned man kept at the glass for a full twenty minutes.

Then the guard in front of our line got up and left without a word.

I felt it go — that thin wire of composure I’d been holding. I started finger-clicking and muttering, then, in my ridiculously rusted German, began mouthing off before asking permission to switch to English. Was soll ich tun jetzt? What should I do now? The young guy in the box looked genuinely surprised that anyone had spoken to him. He shrugged and said something noncommittal about using another box — of which there was one, with its own queue.

Didn’t he realise he was asking me to do the very thing I am trained, as an Englishman of a certain age, never to do.

Queue jump.

Which I did in the end. Waved through by some very sweet young women. The officer who eventually stamped my passport was equally kind, and in the end the whole thing melted away, storm in a teacup that it was. Crazy, looking back — sweating over a sweat lodge.

Before any of this, speaking with Tom on the first day of the full moon of his people’s new year, he told us it is better not to know what happens in a sweat lodge ceremony. What matters above all else is your intention.

Mine I can share with you.

I prayed to be released from the curse of judgment — of myself and my fellow humans. I demanded to know the gifts I came here to share and what spirit wished me to do with them.

The lodge is done in four rounds of heat. Between rounds the door is opened and the fire keepers leave it until the people inside have recovered. Then they bring in new heated stones, the door shuts, and the singing and the stories begin again.

In the first round I watched the grandfather stones sparkle in the dark like fireflies.

In the second I began to burp and I knew what was coming. The dizziness. The plan forming — how I might feint backwards away from the heat. I wanted to get up and run the way you do when you need to make it to the toilet in an emergency, but I couldn’t move. The lodge was packed and I was where I was. I knew I had to surrender but it seemed impossible, and then the relief as I retched into my own hands, and not wanting to defile the lodge I held it there, dribbling the water — that’s all it was, water from fasting — into my lap so my shorts would soak it up. Patrick saw and gave me water from a ladle, poured more into my lap to clean me.

At the end of that round I sat serene. A feeling of love holding me.

The third and fourth rounds — sitting so close to the heat of the stones — were just as hard. Maybe it’s the high of the athlete after they’ve passed the pain barrier. Maybe it’s just what’s on the other side of surrender.

Crawling out of the lodge at the end, covered in sweat and mud and the watery contents of my stomach, like a baby born out of the earth.

Which is what we are.

What I learned in Bad Sulza in the dark and the heat of the lodge will come clear over the weeks and months that follow. Will reveal itself in the tracks I make as I wander through the days to come.

I’ve learned how desperate is our need for ritual and ceremony and community. That the lodge is a womb of heat and darkness and song.

Back home, the Mexican palm in our garden has stuck out its tongue. The flowering pods are skinned pink and amber yellow, protruding from the plant’s trunk, each one like a swollen, psychedelic human tongue. It’s been eleven years since we nursed it back to life and this is the first time it’s flowered.

It feels significant. Like the hawk we saw hovering as we lit the ceremonial fire, and the bee that entered the lodge as the fire keepers invited us to purify the space with sage and prayers.

So a return.

After a journey of billions of miles through the Milky Way — lying on my back, squinting at the sun-mottled clouds, the song of the birds sweeter than ever.

Held.

Breathing in the cool wind moving through the spring leaves, feeling for the first time what it means to call the earth mother and mean it without embarrassment or hesitation.

Tomorrow I will go out in the morning light to see what has become of the palm tree’s new tongues.

Till next week,

Love,

Mikey

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