When I was seventeen I felt that things were spiralling out of control. The world was big and I was young and insecure and there was too much suffering and too many problems. I’d always found schoolwork easy, but these problems were something else. I couldn’t even understand them, let alone solve them. In Continue Reading »
I hate shopping. Shopping, and by extension the entire human project of reducing this miraculous home of ours into a giant department store and then looting it, is an exercise in enslavement. Surfing, on the other hand, or anything else that involves surrender to the laws of the non-human – hiking, gardening, mountaineering – is Continue Reading »
Cut firewood. Treat yourself to a brand new saw. Don’t press with it, just move your arm and let gravity do the rest. Find firewood. This is better than buying it, because it means you don’t have to work, which means you don’t end up accidentally paying for Trident. There is firewood everywhere if Continue Reading »
I’ve been having a mid-life crisis for about six years. Ever since I turned thirty and realised that the trail of loose ends and missed opportunities and messed-up relationships and recreational brain-damaging was irrevocable. I wasn’t in the foothills of life, getting acclimatised, finding my feet, which is what I’d thought. This was life. And Continue Reading »
The north wind is behind me And I’ve planted out my sweet peas The money tree is thriving But the best things here are free When people ask, I tell them I am writing a book about housing called Why I Live in a Shed. What I am actually doing is running, singing, surfing, drinking, Continue Reading »
Thanks to an award from the Society of Authors worth six months of gardening, I am donating most of my present moments to writing about the shed and other shed-related issues; ecological obliteration, the housing crisis, stars. I’ve been animal sitting among snow-covered mountains on a remote hillock topped with a few dozen tall and Continue Reading »
Since I might as well be hung for a horse as a lamb, and I’m clearly intent on making myself unpopular just in time for Christmas, I decided to clarify a couple of things relating to my last post. I did not mean to imply that wild places should be left unvisited by humankind so Continue Reading »
I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy. I could sit here all day and type lines I love, but if I was going to type just one, it would probably be this one: ‘The horse raised its head above the skyline to listen among the constellations.’ I like to raise my head above the skyline to listen Continue Reading »
I am in Wales, staying in a town full of writers and environmentalists. Specifically, I am staying with Jay Griffiths, looking after her cats while she is talking about Time at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and then talking about Frida Kahlo in Stornoway. The world turns in mysterious ways. Years ago I used to Continue Reading »
I love books about as much as I love anything. That’s why I wrote one. It’s also why I have decided to share my love of particular books and their authors with a special “bookshelf” post each month (or six months…) I won’t be attempting exhaustive critiques. I will simply be sharing my personal connections, Continue Reading »
