orbific weblog – Strange stories and interesting things

Monthnotes: July 2026

After a lovely June, July felt like pissing into the wind and I’m glad it’s done. The wheels fell off at the start of the month from a combination of stress, bad food and sickness – and never really got running again. Work commitments also meant cancelling some plans made back in September. There were some lovely high points, but overall it was a drag.

The month started with a trip to the Lytham Festival to see Skunk Anansie and Alanis Morisette. I’ve not been to a lot of gigs since the pandemic, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. There was also a fun zine session at In a Land with Caitlin, a hike with some work friends, the office summer gathering, Gina and Lou’s wedding, an engineering summit, and Cleria and Mark’s visit.

Work has, however, squatted toad-like over everything, with a delayed release causing a lot of stress. I’d also failed to book the holiday to EMF Camp that I’d planned since September. This was a stupid mistake, one I’d not expect from a junior, and it cost me the holiday. Our team have been doing a fantastic job with a complicated release process, but it’s been a slog. I do have a rotation date now – I am going to dearly miss working with our team, but I am excited about a change.

The big problem at the moment is that I’m not having enough fun. I’m not very good at type-1 fun (enjoyable in the moment), and end up aiming for type-2 fun (preparation or stress that’s fun to look back on). All my hobbies have deadlines, and I often commit myself to projects I later regret. While I wasn’t very good at drinking, I miss the silliness and spontaneity of those nights out. While fixing this feels a little harder than just ‘have some fun’, I definitely know some things I should stop doing.

One of the things that needs to be more fun is the writing. I have started a larger project that I’m enjoying. I’m not sure what anyone else might make of it, but that’s part of why it’s fun. I’ve also been thinking a lot about a John Higgs essay I read about being a writer and, you know, maybe I should lean into that a little more.

We’ve looked after 4 different dogs this month – Shuggie (pictured), Midge, Bernie and Fern

The month included a lot of cinema trips. The Odyssey was an interesting take on the myth, although I regretted seeing it in an Everyman Cinema. I found the last ten minutes of Undertone so terrifying that for a few minutes I regretted watching it. Evil Dead Burn was unrepentantly nihilistic, and made me question why I was watching something so unpleasant. Rosy and I tried watching Election, but it was so vile that we gave up after 30 minutes. War Dogs was geopolitics as teen comedy, and it left me shocked. I’ve also started a new letterboxd list for Films I’ve Given Up Watching. Entry one: The Amateur.

I read some good books this month. John Higgs’ The Bees are our Friends was a lovely miscellany, which has set me off thinking about a few things. The dystopian book group selected 1956’s savage The Death of Grass. While it displayed some dated attitudes, these were mostly used to attack British post-imperial exceptionalism. Babylon, South Dakota was a recommendation from Talking Scared podcast and very different to what I’d normally read. John Langan’s The Fisherman was a great piece of cosmic horror, despite a nested structure that I didn’t love. Having abandoned Mick Herron’s Clown Town on a first read back in January, I gave it a second try after Warren Ellis described it as having a more interesting resolution. I also finished a couple of dull books from June that I should have abandoned – see what I mean about having fun?

Carlo Rovelli’s slim book on nuclear war, 85 Seconds to Midnight was filled with nightmares. I find it incredible that we could kill most of humanity in a matter of hours and our politicians don’t want to face this. I spend a lot of time thinking about nuclear war, and can’t understand how everyone else doesn’t.

I only started following Charli XCX after the remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, and subsequently liked the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. I’ve fallen in love with the new record Music, Fashion Film. The vocals remind me of George Pringle, and final track No-one Lasts Forever, featuring David Cronenburg, is a masterpiece. I wasn’t expecting a record about making art in the face of our mortality.

A positive note to end on – I signed up for a gym this month. It took a while to get the induction session sorted, but it’s a significant move. I’m also going to increase my daily steps total to 6000. I don’t have the heart for a full 10,000 right now, but maybe once I move to my new work client.

Another downer from July – I have some expensive dental work coming up. I’m questioning whether I can afford to maintain teeth.
On top of everything else, I had food poisoning from some vegan rice at the Alanis Morisette gig. I drove home before it hit but then I was out of action all that next day. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so ill.
This month brought another new prime minister. I’m not expecting much from this one – I don’t think he has big enough ideas and the lack of mandate will bring him down.
Spotify search is terrible – I ended up downloading all my data to find a single earworm.
We have swifts nesting in the eaves. It’s great to see them flying near the house.
This blog is currently a wikipedia citation for the release of Buck 65’s album King of Drums.
We’ve had the chimney fixed, so we’re all set for winter.

The view from Balcombe viaduct is my favourite in the world

Monthnotes: June 2026

I spent much of June on holiday, my longest break in years, visiting Jake and Scarlett in Wales. The plan was to spend some time helping to renovate an old school into an arts centre. Doing physical tasks day after day took its toll, but I enjoyed the change of work. It was a very good break.

June also included my 50th birthday, celebrated while I was in Wales. It is strange to reach an age that once seemed so remote. The main change is that I’m aware of having less time left. It’s time to get on with the things that actually matter.

Before going on holiday, I managed to get my weight under control, and then didn’t track it while I was away. I’ve spoken again and again in the last year about needing to focus on getting fit, and crossing the threshold of 50 is a call to action – I can also feel myself growing less flexible. I’ve been in touch with a couple of gyms and will hopefully start training in July.

My writing has been slow – the regular story emails continue, but I still struggle to work out what to do next. I want to work on a larger project than regular, unrelated microfictions, but I’m finding it hard to make progress with anything.

My Satnav suggested this single lane track as an appropriate route.
Great scenery, terrible idea

My trip to Wales was my longest holiday in my current job. It was difficult to go away in the late stages of a project, but I think it was important to disengage. I returned feeling fresher, and clear-headed. Before I left, a few people mentioned that I had seemed stressed, so that is something to dial down a little.

This month’s dystopian book club choice was a terrible 600-pager, an apocalyptic military fiction that dragged itself through much of the month. The Haves and Have-Yachts was a compilation of New Yorker articles, none of the others being as good as the excellent title piece. As research, I re-read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I also read Wimmy Road Boys, inspired by a Guardian article on the writer. I had to look up a lot of the slang, but it’s a great book, and an exploration of a culture I had little knowledge of.

Only half-a-dozen films this month. I saw Masters of the Universe with Rosy, and it was predictably terrible, even in IMAX. I only caught a few movies in Wales – rewatches of Sinners and Inception, and I finally saw Titanic. I watched all ten episodes of Widow’s Bay across three days at the end of my time off, and that was excellent. I’m also excited about the Legally Blonde prequel, which places Elle as a fish-out-of-water in grunge-era Seattle. It’s an interesting inversion to see the grunge kids as the bad guys and a ‘plastic’ as the hero.

The shortness of this entry belies a wonderful month, spending time in good company, meeting so many inspirational people. Hopefully we will all get a chance to spend time together again in the near future.

Moments of Time-Travel

Back in 2010, I wrote a blog post, Thinking about Time-Travel, prompted by a question raised on Twitter – ‘What advice would you give to your sixteen year-old Self?’

The advice I wrote then was: “Don’t bother with uni. And take English Lit & History, not Maths and physics for A-Level“. I now see that some even more useful advice would have been to quit boarding school and go to sixth form college. That degenerate and isolated environment was no good for me.

At the end of the post, published when I was thirty-four, I wrote: “Of course, it would be more useful if my fifty year old self could tweet me and give me a heads-up”.

And now I’m fifty years old. The gap between those two times seems both short and long. That’s the nature of time travel.

Thirty-four-year-old me needed a lot of advice. I was unhappy a lot of the time, working a succession of jobs that I hated. I also didn’t appreciate how much fun I was having. But I did the best that I could.

The pandemic changed everything, jolting me out of the ruts I was in. It ended the five-days-a-week office culture, replacing it with something more manageable. There was a block of flats built right outside my window in Brighton, which led me to move somewhere new. Both of these were outside events, but I made good things happen from them.

I left Brighton, moved to a new part of the country, and found a job I love. I still can’t believe I’ve had the same employer for over three years (44 months!). I feel a lot happier living in a small town than I did in the city.

There’s a line in an Arcade Fire song – “If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted, I’d only waste it again”. The last sixteen years had a lot of wasted time, but I’m not convinced things would have worked out so well without it. I’m not the person I wanted to be, but I am a person I’m happy to be.

In terms of advice – maybe I’d say one important fact to my sometimes-struggling 34-year old self, but otherwise it would mostly be reassurance. You’re feeling OK at 50. You’re healthy. You’ve finally found a job you love. You’re living in a new place.

(One of the comments on my previous post asked ‘do you think you’ll be blogging in 20 years time …?’ And I’m only four years from that, so maybe I’ll be posting here again in sixteen years time. If I am still alive then, I will be sixty-six. Still a good age if I’m lucky and I look after myself. There’s a lot of time until sixty-six.)

Monthnotes: May 2025

May was challenging. We were supposed to release the work project I’ve worked on since November, but the testing phase won’t end – although the bugs were all false positives from testing issues. The long client-office commute has been wearing, even when it’s only twice a week. My life is good overall, but this has been one of those months with too much to keep track of, and a constant hum of anxiety. The brighter mornings haven’t helped, the early light waking me despite the blackout curtains. As good as everything is, I’ve felt tired and frustrated.

The month started in Stroud, where I visited Mr Spratt and his family. I had a lovely relaxed time, including a decent hike – something I’ve not done enough this year. I always dread making trips involving long drives, but I’m glad I did this. I even enjoyed the three pub visits we made while we were there, which doesn’t often happen since I quit drinking. I should commit to more such expeditions.

Other adventures included a weekend in Blackpool, watching movies with Muffy. I also discovered the excellent Aunty Social shop. I escaped the office in Manchester for an hour to visit the Whitworth’s exhibition of Japanese prints, dragging my new team along with me. In Hebden Bridge, we celebrated Rosy’s birthday with a party (although I didn’t make it to midnight).

This was the month where my weight finally broke containment. I weigh myself daily, tracking it through a moving average, and this average hit the highest number since I started this round of tracking in 2019. It’s finally got me being more careful about my diet, getting a rein on the stress-eating as well as well as upping my daily step target. The spike appears to have been a short-term blip rather than a permanent change, but I’m staying alert.

The writing continues to go well. I’m trying to settle into a regular practise, getting a flow of new work out. I went to both of the month’s writing group sessions, despite them occurring on commute days. I’ve also cleared out the blog post drafts I’ve accumulated. I’m still longing to work on a big project, but my way there is through getting smaller pieces out.

I published seven blog posts in May:

I love the hope implied by this clarification – that there is a possibility of this line-up without tribute acts

I finished twelve books in May, although this was mostly finishing several half-completed ones; reading so many things simultaneously is not the best way to enjoy books. David Marx’s Blank Space was a quick read, an interesting cultural history of the 21st century. While I knew much of the material, this had ended with an provocative and useful manifesto. Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker was a great follow up to We Used to Live Here. While I don’t like Kliewer’s prose on a sentence level, he’s definitely at the start of an interesting career. Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling likely falls into the true crime genre, but he tells the tragic story of Zac Brettler very well.

The month’s best meal was probably the sweet potato hash in Stroud, but a similar dish in Leeds ran a close second.

A big theme for May has been reducing digital clutter – clearing out old blog posts and the hundreds of articles I had on my Kindle. I love using the FiveFilters Push to Kindle service to send article from my browser, but it had got out of hand. It feels like there are several areas of my life that have become cluttered and stagnant. This is something I’m being careful with, particularly when I have so little spare time and energy.

I love this view of Manchester in the distance

More time was made available when I abandoned playing Death Stranding 2. The game has some moments of incredible beauty, but the plot is dreary, and the gun-play annoying. It felt like there were better things I could do with my time, so I stopped. I wish I could have finished some of the roads but I was sick of the bosses. It feels like Kojima’s innovations were strangled by the form’s cliches.

It saw a lot of films this month, with seven trips to the cinema. Obsession was an excellent horror movie. Mother Mary was too long but worth it for the imagery. The Mandalorian and Grogu was predictably disappointing. I saw The Backrooms on opening night and found myself the only adult in a cinema packed with teenagers. Nomadland was beautifully made but deeply flawed (I thought this review was an excellent response)

I’m exasperated by politics. Kier Starmer might feel a failure as prime minister but he was elected with a massive majority and he shouldn’t be discarded lightly. It seems obvious why Reform are winning – they are the only party promising an improvement to the grimness of the British economy since the 2008 financial crisis. Reform’s use of immigrants as scapegoats is vile – but they are the only party offering something other than managed decline. I don’t see why Labour are so unable to promise any hope.

A week or two later, someone had demolished the art in the woods.

I loved Caity Weaver’s essay: I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America. Entertaining and informative.
“When you publish physical editions of your work it graduates from the pejorative classification of ‘content’ to, at worst, an object, if not a product, and hopefully, eventually, a successfully circulating artwork.” – Bobby Campbell
I gave up on Tom’s Crossing. It’s a great book, but I don’t have the bandwidth for it right now. Maybe in a few month’s time.
I’ve found a fourth birthday twin in Midge the dog, who has his first birthday next month.

It’s weird to see AI-generated images for sale as physical objects, particularly at such a high price

Next month is a big one – and landmark birthday that’s likely to provoke a little soul-searching.

A Great Work

When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to one day publish a novel. Over time, I realised that being published will not solve my problems, or make me feel better. I’ve seen people I know achieve the sort of success I longed for and end up unhappy. And, besides that, the novel is a less important form than it was thirty years ago.

I did try for a long time. I have four finished novels, two of them that I think are good. I made a few attempts to sell them, and eventually settled down to other things. The submission of my work is the bit I hate about it most – the rejection cuts too deep and it makes me enjoy writing less. If someone reached out and asked to publish a book of mine, I’d be eager; but I’m not interested in begging for it. It’s the same with self-promotion. My enjoyment of my work is a fragile thing, and taking up strangers’ time by demanding they read it proves too much for me. There are risks to not submitting my work, of not having anything to calibrate against, but I’m happy to take that chance.

At the moment, I write a weekly story on a newsletter. I enjoy that, but I want to work on something larger. I have this idea of a great work in my head, something huge but composed of fragments. It’s not a book, not in its first iteration – I think fiction is more interesting online, where it is able to move in new ways; streams, not texts. There are huge opportunities offered by all these different platforms.

The South Downs Way is a start towards this. But I always run into trouble with big concepts – the structure takes over. Instead I want a process more like making a jigsaw – to generate fragments and see how they fit together. Maybe a new tiny story/fragment a day, if I can get up to that pace.

It’s a different way of working, but one that I have to have faith in. If I work with all these tiny fragments then the structure will emerge.

A Tale of Two Beds

On Thursday 5th March, I went to the Tate and saw Tracey Emin’s bed, a piece of art I last saw in the 90s.

A couple of days later, I visited the Bronte Parsonage, where I saw the reconstruction of Branwell Bronte’s bed. This representation of Branwell’s room “as it might have looked in the late 1830s” was made for a 2017 exhibition.

Emin’s bed is the original, but the artwork reproduces her room at a particular time in the past. This bed was once owned by Charles Saatchi, who apparently installed it in a dedicated room in his own house.

The South Downs Way: What Next?

Since 2019, I’ve been working on a series of stories set along the South Downs Way. At almost 40,000 words, this is the largest thing I’ve published, and it’s still expanding. The work consists of six print zines and a few dozen stories shared on my mailing list. I’ve now created a website to gather these stories together and help me to trace the work’s structure.

The obvious inspiration for this project is Geoff Ryman’s 253 – but my story is so complicated I’ve got lost in it myself. If I can’t find the paths through, what hope do any readers have? Hopefully, working through the site will help me make this clearer for everyone, including me.

The original plan for The South Downs Way was to do 150 stories, then 200, and it somehow grew to releasing 20 zines throughout the decade, but I’m fine with falling behind on that. I don’t mind if it takes thirty years before this is ‘finished’ (whatever that means).

There are several elements of this book that never happened. I started in 2019, when I expected to be in Brighton for many years, but I left in 2021. If I was still based near the trail then walking/performance would be a larger part of the narrative. It is possible to read the stories as a hike, from west to east, and maybe I’ll do that eventually.

For now, the website provides a simple way to approach this story. Sometimes, my work feels like a lot of different strands that don’t add up to anything. This is true not just of the South Downs Way but everything as a whole – the horror advent calendar, mailing list etc. I want to make my work easier for readers to understand – but more than anything for myself.

Professional Decline

Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.”

An article I’ve been thinking about a lot is a 2019 piece by Arthur C. Brooks, originally shared by Russell Davies. Your Work Peak is Earlier Than You Think looks at the inevitable, how we decline as we grow older. Up till now, I’ve been able to work with the assumption that I will remain capable at my current pace and workload until the day I retire. Brooks says this is not true:

The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.” Quoting an expert in the field of career trajectories, Brooks has bad news for me: “if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that

Brooks finds an interesting angle for his article – not just looking at how decline happens, but how one can manage this decline happily. The waning of ability can be tough on people.

Brooks writes about Raymond Cattell’s concept of ‘crystallised intelligence’. Fluid intelligence is “the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems”, and this is something that declines, whereas crystallised intelligence is the use of knowledge. Brooks suggests that, as we grow older, we should aim our careers toward “the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life”.

One example given is that of teaching – “No matter what our profession, as we age we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way”.

How to make the most of the future?

New ways of story-telling

The Doc Web is a now-lost piece that survives in the Internet Archive, written by Elan Kiderman Ullendorff, about how any tool can be transformed into something to write with.

Yelp reviews will be co-opted to publish blog posts; Venmo payments will be co-opted to publish poems; spreadsheets will be co-opted to publish personal websites; maps will be co-opted to publish magazines.

The article focuses specifically on Google docs, with examples of some of the things that have been produced (including ‘a poetry mixtape’ from the pandemic). The piece describes the ephemerality of these docs: “Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it has changed. Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it is gone.” But, in the end, that is the fate of all writing, including Elan Kiderman Ullendorff’s original piece.

I’ve written about interesting new formats in the past. Where to publish your stories? is a summary of a talk by Chris Parkinson in 2014.

At the end of his talk, Chris urged the audience, “Leave your stories lying around in unorthodox, unethical locations,” pointing out that his quick hoaxes had gained larger audiences than his self-published collections.

A similar article is Spencer Chang’s We’re All (Folk) Programmers Now, which seeks to remind people of the radical opportunities offered by the web. These days, Geocities feels like a miracle. But, even so, we can repurpose software. “The crowdsourced nature of Google Maps can be hijacked to write a love letter under the guise of a new restaurant”.

[Comments under a Youtube video are] but one example of people repurposing comment sections into their own particular social networks. Amazon reviews of a Tuscan Milk product are now a space for inventive fiction, a Billie Eilish remix video was repurposed into someone’s journal for a year, and music videos become sites to share memories… From using Discord as a journaling app to weaving in Word and painting in Excel to selling homecooked goods on Facebook Marketplace, we always find ways to make software work for us,

Chang compares these reuses as “‘desire lines in digital space”. And innovative formats are not limited to the Internet. I recently read about Lululux by Gustavo Piqueira:

The fictional narrative is subdivided into 34 parts. There are not, however, 34 chapters. Actually, it’s rather difficult to classify Lululux as a book. Unbound by any fixed structure, its content is spread across a ‘narrative dining set’, which includes 20 napkins, six placemats and eight coasters.

There are so many potential new forms for fiction waiting to be discovered.

Mycelium Parish News Update

I’m continuing to send out copies of the Mycelium Parish News, mine and Dan Sumption’s annual catalogue of counter-culture. Thanks to everyone who has supported us and helped to get the word out. We’re slowly working on the 2026 edition, which will be out in January 2027.

The Mycelium Parish News at the Skiff, my old co-working space

I particularly liked what Kate Shields wrote about the zine in a recent newsletter:

I was excited to receive in the post the latest edition of the Mycelium Parish News: its a great project that features listings of underground, subversive projects by artists, writers, musicians and other weirdos operating in the mycelial counter-culture. You can get a copy through here. The fact that its a physical, self-published magazine sent through the post that only appears once a year makes it a quietly radical project in a world of overwhelm. It is comforting to know there is so much going on than we think, deep in the soil below us.

“A quietly radical project” – I love that description.