Writing

Steven perched on a bench outside the small Tesco picking at his meal deal. He’d perfected his lunch. He knew how to get 76g of protein in one meal deal, but he resented Tesco. Did they think he was an ignorant fool? Of course he noticed the 15p price hike. The bench was in a plaza surrounded by flats and offices built in the new London vernacular, with an ersatz country pub, “Punk Pizza”, and an estate agent’s. Steven watched a pigeon hobble about on gnarled stubs but it didn’t care. It seemed to take whatever chance it got to get food, and on a whim it could fly up on top of anything it liked. ...

Life In what was formerly the drawing room of a grand Victorian tenement in the fashionable west end of Glasgow, utilitarian bookcases of the sort you’d find in a library with midcentury aspirations lined the walls. The shelves were packed with curious and cryptic tomes filled with mathematics that has largely been forgotten by most people since it was discovered in the late 17th century, and accompanying these were Cordelia Graham’s self-penned treatises on cosmology. The collection had long outgrown the shelves which Cordelia had bought forty years ago, and much of the floor was now underneath a Himalayan topography of books and papers. ...

We are walking between bowers of birch, A breath of air gently moves the branches As it begins to rain, the trees release an organic perfume And we listen to the patter of droplets falling onto leaves We are walking among the granny pine and hazel As the trees becomes sodden, their leaves channel heavier drops into moss that has grown as deep as our ankles We step over tree trunks, we hear the soft crumpling of rotten wood under our feet ...

Have you ever found yourself in the midst of a soiree, regaling the captive audience with one of your classic, spontaneous anecdotes only to find it’s as deflated as the tyres on an abandoned bicycle? Your audience is captive merely because they already like you, perhaps for your kind nature or punctuality; they are not engaged with your impotent narrative. Well, you are not alone. Believe it or not, I used to suffer from the damp anecdote on a regular basis, but with the following tips, I will take you from delivering dull monologues to keeping your peers on tenterhooks at the ebbs and flows of your Shakespearean soliloquy. ...

The Astonishing Life’s Work of John Buchanan. My dear friend and mentor, the late John Buchanan, devoted his life to discovering and translating the lost languages and dialects of the mediæval inhabitants of this island. He held the esteemed position of Professor Emeritus and Chair of Philological Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and he had an unparalleled understanding of how to interpret arcane, ancient, and archaic texts. In the last three years of his life, unburdened by political or monetary motivations, he could devote himself to a project that he had begun in 1959 while completing his PhD. ...

February “I’m interested in Marxist Impressionism, mostly.” “What do you mean, Marxist Impressionism?” It was becoming clear to the rest of gathering that Drummond had no idea what he was on about, but he’d got swept up trying to impress the gathering that he was inventing his opinions on the spot. Drummond was self-proclaimed radical and polymath, not realising that polymath isn’t someone with a good enough grasp the on contents of Stroud’s Calculus for Engineers to pass their degree nor someone who watches a few Youtube videos a week with titles like “Visualising the Fourier Transform”. Drummond’s radicalness was exemplified by his authoring of an impressive number of communist memes on Reddit. By doing this, he had become familiar with a decent amount of left-wing jargon. Drummond believed that because he understood how serious things, like concrete, worked, he should be able to do a good enough job at bullshitting his way through a conversation about a style of art he’d just made up mere moments ago. ...

There are loads of ways of making websites and not all of them suit the problem or the person making the website. This post summarises my experience as someone who knew nothing about web development to someone who has a website. I hope readers can take away some ideas if they’re wanting to make a website. First impressions matter. Before the end of 2023, I hadn’t done any web development, but I had a general idea of how to put together an application from my experience with developing an Android app. The main gaps in my knowledge lie around Javascript frameworks. I wanted to know why React had become the de facto standard, apparently, for developing user interfaces. ...

Nobody asks you write to anything and it is probably because nobody cares what you think. That was hyperbolic and cynical. Of course, some people care what you think but they don’t require you to express it to them in one thousand spell-checked words. So, why would anyone who is not paid to write bother doing it? I didn’t have a desire to write until I was midway through my PhD thesis. I’m embarrassed to mention that I did a PhD as I think it makes me (one?) seem pretentious, but it is relevant to mention my degree here since it is the only time I’ve had to write a book. When I set out to write my thesis, I saw writing up as a means to an end, but as I was working through it, I found that I was enjoying the process of writing. Putting your thoughts into a coherent order is satisfying because it replaces a vague sense of how things are with some clarity. By the time I had finished writing up, I genuinely cared about what made a piece of writing well-formed. I felt, though, that I didn’t get to write in the way I wanted; instead, I had to write in a formal, neutral voice and there wasn’t space for personal flair or meandering thoughts. So while I had enjoyed writing with the goal of precision and clarity, I felt that the process of writing up had ultimately taught me some mechanical tricks about writing and editing. ...