🚗 The Freedom of Being in Transit One of the more agreeable features of my profession is that it requires a considerable amount of travelling. The English courts are scattered across the country, often in towns which might otherwise remain little more than names upon a map. I have come to
🌊 The People We Used to Be 「ゆく河の流れは絶えずして、しかももとの水にあらず」 The river flows without ceasing, and yet its water is never the same.— Kamo no Chōmei, Hōjōki (1212) 🌊 Returning to the River Over a year ago, after walking the Kumano Kodo, I wrote about Chōmei’s river. I took its ceaseless flow
Three experiments in freedom on the Isle of Wight An island is an obvious place on which to dream of escape. Water supplies a boundary that appears natural rather than defensive; the mainland remains visible, but its claims seem temporarily suspended. On the Isle of Wight, within a few miles
🌅 The Colour of Beginnings I have made these photographs of Rome slightly too golden. Not extravagantly so. The marble has not become amber and the skies remain approximately the skies I saw. But I have warmed them. Travertine catches a little more afternoon light than perhaps it did; interiors glow
🌿 Before I Saw Corsica, I Smelt It Some landscapes announce themselves visually: the severe horizontality of the desert, the improbable green of an English valley after rain, the white villages of Andalusia beneath an intense blue. Corsica has plenty of this beauty. Its mountains rise abruptly, granite shouldering through vegetation;
🌧️ A House That Has Learned to Weather There are some places that seem to resist history. Their stones are scrubbed clean, their roofs carefully repaired, their gardens restored to the geometry intended by the original architect. They reassure us that beauty can be preserved if only enough money, labour, and
I cannot now remember precisely when I first saw the bridge. This is an odd admission. I have a photograph of it. I remember the heat of the afternoon and the brown water of the Avon below. I remember thinking that the gorge was greener than I had expected. Yet
At Barrington Court, the paths seem older than the gardens. This is not literally true, of course. The avenues, orchards, walls, and flower borders have all been shaped by human hands. Yet the paths possess a different quality. They feel less constructed than remembered. The long avenue stretching away from
⚔️ 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
"We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” — René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel 🪞 The Reversal of Names The names themselves seem to be mirrors when put into the Roman alphabet, Tokyo and Kyoto. But 東京 and 京都 is just a same kanji reversed, one facing
‘Non facit martyrem poena, sed causa.‘ ‘It is not the punishment that makes the martyr, but the cause’ Augustine, Sermon 307 St Albans does not shout. It does not arrange itself for reverence. It lives in weather, stone, and the ordinary rhythm of an English town. Yet here, a man
“Genuine repetition is recollected forward.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition Six months after my first encounter with Qatar’s glittering coast, I returned. This time, I turned away from Doha’s vertical gleam and drove into the north and west, where the desert meets the sea without spectacle. I told myself this
“The rose is without why. It blooms because it blooms. It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen.” — Angelus Silesius, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann I.289 🌾 I. Hokkaido’s Refusal to Explain There is a different stillness in Hokkaido. Not the composed silence of Honshu’s gardens, measured