Two days clearing a backyard. The wisteria had wrapped itself around everything, pipe, wire, post, root, patiently, for years, while everyone admired it. Why do we wait for something to look dangerous before taking it seriously?

Jean-Dominique Bauby blinked his way through an alphabet for ten months to produce literature. The locked in generation has full use of everything, yet points it all entirely inward.

On a building site in Blakehurst, an Italian concreter said something about coffee and cortisol that changed how every day starts. The unexpected source is the whole point.

The stuff you surround yourself with is your raw material. The seeking, the finding, the placing. This is what separates a life that feels lived from one that merely functions.

Andy Serkis invented a new form of acting. His face has barely been seen in any of his roles. This is about what the friction was producing before we removed it.

Someone put a wheel in a shoe in 2000 and it almost changed everything. This is about why Heelys didn't tip, and why joy isn't a strong enough engine.

Gasolina came out in 2004. The world wasn't ready. This is a belated apology for being part of the problem.

Some people go to the toilet when they need to. Others go on the off chance. This is about what that difference says about how people move through the world.

The front seat people. The back seat people. The person in the aisle seat with the window free who knows exactly what they're doing. A piece about the unwritten constitution of public transport.

Smell is the most underrated sense. It bypasses consent, ambushes you with memory, and proves something was real. No prompt has ever put you somewhere the way a bad smell at a bus stop can.

We've outsourced so much forward planning to algorithms and apps that the mental muscle for anticipating anything has stopped working. This is about corners, and what they reveal about everything else.