⚔️ Battle Abbey and the Difficulty of Finding the Dead The day began at Battle Abbey, though I left not entirely certain where the battle itself had actually happened. That stayed with me more than the history. The strange inability to locate violence precisely. Somewhere beneath the soft Sussex slopes men
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.” — Arthur Schopenhauer The day began not with cliffs or castles, but with adolescence and consequence. In Weymouth Youth Court, I spent the morning listening to the small catastrophes of ordinary lives. Youth courts possess a peculiar sadness. Nothing
🏛️ Canterbury and the Ache of Home The last time I came to Canterbury, I was with the Vatican cricket team. There is something faintly comic about that memory now, though also strangely moving: priests and seminarians in cricket whites, Roman collars folded into luggage, the Vatican arriving in England not
⚖️ The Week of Lists A week in the magistrates’ court does something to the mind. Not dramatic, not even especially memorable, but cumulative. Lists of cases, each one clipped to the next, each one requiring a kind of immediate clarity. Names, dates, charges, pleas. The language becomes functional, almost hydraulic.
🌿 The Hill Before the City — Old Sarum At Old Sarum, the ground still holds the shape of a centre. The earth rises and curves, enclosing what was once organised, inhabited, defended. But nothing now occupies it. The form remains. The necessity has gone. There is no violence in the transition.
🌿 Sudeley: the discipline of form At Sudeley, nothing appears to have been left to chance. The hedges curve inward with a patience that feels almost moral. Their lines are held, not simply grown. Circles close upon themselves. Paths return. Even the ruins seem to have been persuaded into coherence, their
There are places that present themselves as landscapes, and places that resist that reduction. Greenham Common belongs to the latter. At first glance, it appears almost deliberately unremarkable. A wide, exposed heath. Gravel paths tracing the faint geometry of former runways. Pools of water collecting where the ground has not
🚪 Threshold There is always a moment of narrowing. The open gives way to the framed, the unbounded to the directed, and without quite noticing, one passes from wandering into movement with intent. A threshold does not announce itself; it simply gathers what was diffuse into a line that must be
The Things That Hold Together There is a moment in Plato’s Statesman where politics is stripped of its grandeur and rendered almost domestic. The true statesman, he says, is not simply a ruler or a commander, but something quieter and more exacting: a weaver. Not one who produces uniformity,
🌿 The Past Arranged, Broken, and Lived There are days that do not yet belong to what follows them. Days that sit just before something begins, without announcing it, without preparing you for it. They pass almost unnoticed, and only later take on the weight of a threshold. This was one
Cities normally begin with power. A fortress secures a frontier. A port commands trade. A palace gathers authority around itself. Bath begins elsewhere. Beneath the limestone hills of Somerset, rainwater seeps slowly through fractures in the rock, descending deep into the earth before rising again as warm mineral springs. By
🏛️ I. Sovereignty in the Age of Strongmen In recent years, modern politics has rediscovered a taste for sovereignty. Donald Trump performs it theatrically, as if will alone could bend institutions. Peter Thiel articulates it more quietly, arguing that democracy dilutes decisive agency and that exceptional individuals must be liberated from