Recursive Words

The Need to Slow Down

September 30, 2025

While racing from one thing to another throughout a typical day, I rarely give any thought to what I might not do – I’m invariably consumed with what I have not done – or what others might be able to accuse me of not doing.

It never occurs to me to not do something – to tell anybody no. I’m not sure if that’s a character failing specific to me, or if everybody suffers from the same problem to an extent.

Whenever I visit the city, I’m always curious about people endlessly rushing to get somewhere – to do something. I wonder what they are rushing towards – what their very important mission involves.

When we travel to visit my parents, we can feel the world slow down – the further we get from London. Perhaps all big cities imbue their inhabitants with the same mania?

In the same way that former professional sports-people seem to have problems with weight when they finish competing (it turns out sitting in an office chair doesn’t burn as many calories as circuit training), I have a similar problem with books. I used to read a lot. For several years I commuted into and out of London each day – four hours on the train – two hours each way. I started by reading the latest books out, and then side-tracked into reading a succession of banned or notorious books – the likes of Lolita, Crash, and Catcher in the Rye. I also read a lot of classics – Anna Karenina, On the Road, and Ulysses among them.

When I stopped commuting, it never occurred to me to stop buying books. I still buy books now – but I don’t make time to read them. I’m too busy trying to do this, that, or the other thing during a typical day.

Just last night I sat in bed doom-scrolling the news on an iPad until 1am. I was back up at 7am, dragging the bins down the driveway, and patting our neighbour’s labrador on the head.

In the couple of hours before work I emptied the dishwasher, half-re-filled it, tidied the lounge up, picked up shoes and coats from the hallway floor, checked email, took more rubbish out, and countless other things.

It’s got to the point where I don’t even realise I’m doing it – I can’t just “be” – there’s always something that needs doing. Something to pick up, something to wash, something to put away, something to throw in the bin, something, something, something…

I know I need to slow down.

Even when I collapse in front of the home-computer on an evening, there’s a hundred and one videos that might be made for the YouTube channel (last night I showed newbies how to borrow a 747, in case they ever come across one with the keys left in it)… They don’t have keys, if you were wondering.

I need to slow down, sit down, and just be. I kind of did a little bit last weekend – but then I had a bad cold, which is perhaps my body’s way of saying “you know those hundred things you were going to do this weekend?” (cue sinister giggle).

Perhaps I should write a self help book on slowing down – and just fill every page with “no, really – slow down”.
An Evening at the Theatre

September 28, 2025

After spending much of the weekend hiding from the world with a nasty cold, we ventured out tonight rather than waste the theatre tickets we bought over a year ago and promptly forgot all about. If the theatre hadn’t sent an email reminder yesterday, there would have been two empty seats in row C this evening.

Hiding from the world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, in case you were wondering. If you’re not feeling great, and then shut yourself in the house with somebody else that’s not feeling great either, there’s a temptation (at least for the other person it seems) to berate you for anything and everything.

It doesn’t help that I really don’t like negativity. I’ve written in the past about the temptation to ignore disasters and look at the next thing, and the next.

Anyway.

After surviving an entire weekend of slings and arrows, this evening we snuck off to the theatre together to see Jack Dee.

If you’re not from the UK, or you’re younger than thirty, you’re probably wondering who Jack Dee is.

Jack Dee is a stand-up comedian – only he really doesn’t tell jokes as such – he complains about things. Endlessly. Now, given that I’ve just said I don’t like negativity, you’re probably wondering why I might be able to withstand a couple of hours barrage of his misgivings and misadventures.

There’s a difference between complained at, and being witness to somebody complaining to nobody in particular. A huge difference. And my word were his complaints relatable. My face hurt from laughter as he descended further and further into a rant laden monologue about anything and everything.

By the time we left, we both agreed that laughter really is the best medicine.

After a few days of feeling pretty rotten and driving each other up the wall, we wandered out of the theatre with toothy grins and endless recollections about this bit, or that bit, or the other.

Of course that all came to a screeching halt after climbing to the sixth floor of the multi-storey car-park filled with every other audience member, who seemed to be suffering from a collective case of “you’re not pushing out in front of me – I’ll die on the sixth storey of the car park rather than lose out on moving my car ten feet further forward before you do”…

Honestly – how do these people function in a normal world? When I used to ride a bicycle to work I became de-sensitised to it – I guess in the intervening period I’ve forgotten just what colossal assholes people can be.

Deep breaths.
Six Days

September 27, 2025

Six Days
Six days have somehow passed since I last wrote – there’s quite a lot to unpack. I’m not really sure where to start, if I’m honest.

Somehow a visit to London last week completely escaped the blog. The company I work for has moved offices – to a space near Paddington Station. Finding the new location was something of an adventure, given that I’ve rarely if ever explored the area around Paddington – my usual exit has been out towards Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park with the children.

It’s always interesting – meeting up with co-workers. Because I work from home I’ve only met the majority a handful of times in the “real world” – we predominantly meet through video calls. Somehow it’s ok for people to remark if somebody is bigger than they thought (I’m quite tall) – but I would never dream of telling anybody “you’re far smaller than I thought”… Maybe this is a part of the “law of the giants” ?

I survived, and was back home in time for tea and medals.

On Tuesday night I met up with old co-workers for a night out. We used to share an office together – before the pandemic – and before “working from home” became a thing. Since then a lot of water has passed under the bridge – the company was acquired, and we have slowly migrated from being important cogs in a small machine to somewhat insignificant footnotes in a leviathan.

Having known each other (for the most part) for over a decade, we became far more than just co-workers. We know each other’s families, and have shared the stories of meeting partners, getting married, and raising children along the way. My other half accompanied me – and worried she would be the only woman there. Thankfully another partner arrived a little later.

Before we knew it the pub called last orders, and we all looked at our watches – surprised.

“I thought it was perhaps 9pm – how is it 11pm already?”

We looked at each other and laughed.

You know the funny thing about meeting up with people you haven’t seen for ages? You catch everything off each other. Within twenty four hours I could feel my body going down-hill. I guess the up-side to working from home is you rarely catch whatever is doing the rounds – but the downside is you lose out on the immunity against all the rubbish that’s doing the rounds. You can’t win.

The next day – against every sensible thought in my head – I went for a run.

I had started back on the “Couch to 5K” programme a little while ago, but stalled after work and home pretty much trampled my life (a long story I won’t be telling here).

Following encouragement from a friend, I pulled my running shoes back on, and headed out. I won’t deny – it felt good – even though I got worse the next day. A part of me was sticking my fingers up at the virus I knew I had – asking it why it had shown up the moment I planned to do anything for me?

It’s funny how the universe does that.

I’ll survive. It’s only a cold. I do feel properly rubbish though. In tandem with it, my other half then caught (we think) the same thing at her work too. I hadn’t said anything about how bad I had been feeling – because what does that achieve – but when she came home on Friday feeling rotten, I confessed.

While feeling sorry for myself on Thursday night I took it upon myself to do something about the multitude of parallel blogs I had conjured a month or so ago. While not able to make my mind up about Substack, Ghost, WordPress, or Tumblr, I invented a Hydra of sorts – and started posting the same content to all of them. A proper “fuck around and find out” tactic if ever there was one.

It’s amazing how feeling rubbish concentrates your mind on doing as little as possible though – and wielding a wrecking ball to anything outside of that became unexpectedly freeing. I said goodbye to Ghost (which was lovely, but slow and expensive), and Substack (which is slowly morphing into the same hell as every other social swamp on the internet).

So yes. I’m back at WordPress. Back where I started.

Actually – that’s not entirely true. Back before 2003, my blog began as a hand-written PHP script (which you can still find, if you know where to look – the last time I looked, it had been downloaded half a million times!). There’s a back-story that I won’t bore you with.

If you’re reading this via email – your subscription was automagically transferred (by me – so not really magic). You don’t need to do anything.

Today… Saturday… Today has been a slow day.

I did make it to Wetherspoons this morning, to grab a cooked breakfast and perhaps write this. I arrived an hour later than usual though, and the entire place was filled with young families not controlling their children. Normally my patience is pretty good – but add a cold and a temperature to the melting pot, and I was kind of “out of fucks”. I ate my “small American” (which still makes me laugh, writing it down), and left.

We both know that chasing our own tail and ignoring being sick never ends well, so have taken our own advice for a change.

We were supposed to go to the pub to watch the rugby this afternoon (well done Red Roses!), and were supposed to visit a neighbour to help celebrate his birthday this evening. Instead we’re holed up at home, wrapped up warm, sipping hot drinks, and watching rubbish on the TV. Well… my other half is watching the TV – I’m obviously writing this.

I don’t really watch much television any more. Sure, the occasional series might catch my interest, but it’s rare. In recent years Mr Robot, Halt and Catch Fire, Westworld, the OA, Silo, For All Mankind, and Fallout have been the only stand-outs that come to mind.

Instead of force feeding myself a steady diet of forgettable television, I tend to spend my evenings tinkering with content for YouTube, or reading. Not always books – quite often the news. I have a free trial of Apple News+ at the moment, which scrapes stories from all corners and removes the worst of the advertising that typically pervades modern journalism. It doesn’t get rid of it entirely – because news organisations sold out a very long time ago – but it’s infinitely better (at a cost) than the web.

The worst part about reading the news? You quickly realise which side each journalist or network is on – and how they have re-framed every story to fit their narrative. It’s tiring – picking slivers of truth from bias, spite, vitriol and hubris.

Anyway.

After not writing for six days, I’ve ended up writing several hundred more words than I was planning to. I’ll shut up now.

I hope you’re well, and will try to write more often in the days to come – because nobody wants to wade through a blog post his long. As Norah Ephron once wrote – blogs are sort of like an exhale – not an opera with encores.
Pottering

September 21, 2025

I’m having a day off from everything today. Well… I say everything, but I’ve filled the washing machine three times. Who knew that chores are a great excuse to avoid getting on with other things?

I’m half expecting somebody to notice the title of the post, and write an acerbic email about J K Rowling without reading far enough to find out the post isn’t about Harry Potter. Maybe I’ll attach a picture of Hogwarts to tip them over the edge. It’s almost like an angry minority spend the greater part of their free time searching for opportunities to vent their fury.

I’ve always found it interesting – how the “social internet” seems to amplify minorities, rather than sizeable majorities – about all sorts of things. It seems the louder you shout, and the less you appreciate any view or opinion other than your own, the more your nonsensical rants become amplified.

People with an axe to grind preach to their favourite echo chambers online, and the rest of us have to put up with their noise as we might a noisy neighbour – mostly because we’re busy getting on with our own lives. That doesn’t mean anybody in particular is right or wrong – or that we should take more notice of this or that happening – it’s just that we all have our own battles – our own challenges.

I can’t fight everybody’s battles.

Now and again something happens, and I can’t help noticing how it re-factors what is seen as important. Mass starvation, civil war, or the rise of a dictatorship tend to re-calibrate the news cycles – rather than circular arguments about the importance of using the correct pronoun.

Anyway.

How on earth did I get from listening to tunes and hanging washing out to tip-toeing around the edge of gender politics and hate speech?

I guess it’s difficult to ignore the news at the moment – especially when so many friends are affected by their own friends and relatives “fucking around and finding out” at the ballot box – or things not turning out the way they might have wished, and spending the next few years spouting anger and bile at anybody that will listen.

It’s happening everywhere – not just in the US – where the most vocal presume the rest of the room is on their side while standing atop self-made soap-boxes spouting poorly informed nonsensical rubbish.

Maybe artificial intelligence could not only check spelling and grammar, but also estimate how much anybody might care about what’s being written? That it would refuse to publish this blog post is not lost on me.
Cult Movies and Atomic Apparel

September 18, 2025

The clock ticked past 11pm a few minutes ago. It’s been six days since I last posted. I’m not entirely sure where the week went. I haven’t been out running. I haven’t even made it out of the house at lunchtime most days. It’s just been a slog from one day to the next – working, doing chores, and slowly going backwards.

It seems a little ridiculous, listing things I didn’t do – I may as well start writing “I didn’t fly to the moon”, “I didn’t solve general relativity”, or “I didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider and gain super-powers”.

The whole Peter Parker thing has always mystified me.

How does radioactivity translate into super-powers? It’s almost like the comic-book writers thought “most people are too stupid to realise that if this works, then so does ‘cup of tea girl’, or ‘slightly indecisive man’”. I can only guess at their powers.

I grew up obsessed with monster movies – typically filled with giant ants, spiders, or whatever else radiation had caused to inflate, expand, or explode. Isn’t it interesting how radiation always caused things to become super-sized in old movies? How come there was never a B movie where the US bombed Japan, and then got absolutely decimated by half a million 200 foot tall angry Japanese folk looking for revenge?

I grew up consuming a steady diet of black-and-white science fiction movies. There was invariably a suave leading man, a shapely girl in a short skirt, a robot, an extremely annoying young boy, and a decidedly untrustworthy old scientist whose nefarious plans would lead to all manner of scrapes and disasters.

None of the principal characters ever died. The suave leading man always kissed the girl – causing her to swoon spectacularly. The robot almost always malfunctioned. The scientist invariably got eaten, melted, or fell off something high, or into somewhere deep.

The world used to be so much more simple.

Don’t even get me started with the “Incredible Hulk” always managing to have enough denim jeans left to cover his bits and pieces. Have you ever seen a She-Hulk comic book? Her shirts and knickers were obviously made of the same censorship imbued denim.

Anyway.

Enough idiocy.

I should go sleep. I’ll try and find time over the weekend to empty my head properly, rather than pour further idiocy into the keyboard.
Favourite Foods

September 14, 2025

There’s writing prompt at WordPress today asking “what are your favourite types of foods”. To be honest, it would be easier to list the foods I don’t like, rather than foods I like best – because I’ll pretty much eat anything (within reason). We’ll ignore that they have written both types and foods as plural.

On various holidays I’ve tried snails, octopus, squid, buffalo, and ostrich. Bizarrely, the ostrich was a Chinese takeaway in a small fishing village on the Firth of Forth in Scotland – figure that one out.

Over time I’ve figured out that I’m mildly allergic to fish. I can eat it if forced, but it has the bizarre effect of both making my nasal cavity hurt, and emptying the entire contents of my body within an hour (lovely). The nasal cavity thing has always struck me as strange – perhaps fish doesn’t get on with the alien implant or something.

I do hope there’s an alien implant up there – it would explain a lot.

I guess I really should answer the question at hand – what food types do I like?

Freshly baked bread. Oh my word. We bought a bread cooker years ago, and had to stop using it because we were starting to upset the balance of the planet’s gravity. It has a timer, so you can have it mix, prove, and bake it’s contents overnight – so when you wander into he kitchen in the morning, it’s filled with the smell of freshly baked bread. Magic.

Pizza. I think the predilection for pizza really comes from the software development background – where food becomes fuel – and the less obstacles between having something that needs cooking, to something you can eat (and that tastes amazing) makes a difference.

Next up would probably be Spaghetti Bolognese. Famously the first thing that young men learn to cook in order to impress their suitors. Later on you also learn that most kids love spaghetti bolognese too, and that it’s one of the cheapest, most nutritious, filling, tasty, and unctuous meals you can make. It can easily be modified to become vegetarian, or gluten free too.

Cottage pie. I’m not sure if it’s the same thing everywhere – the British version is essentially a beef and vegetable casserole topped with mashed potato, baked to brown with grated cheese across the top. It’s a winter favourite – for all the same reasons as Spaghetti bolognese (and a great way to trick kids into eating vegetables).

Lasagne. Oh my word, what I’ll do for a well cooked lasagne. Layers of pasta filled with meat, roast vegetables, or both.

Curry. It seems a bit wrong to just write “curry” because you’re grouping together all manner of cultures and cuisines in the same word. I do love curry though – probably siding with either Thai, or Indian curries above others. I don’t choose the really hot ones, because I don’t like paying for them the next day – but love the social side of curry – tearing and sharing bread – perhaps with a drink or two to accompany it.

One thing that has stayed with me from my earliest days living on my own – and that I sometimes make for my own children (and they love) is beans on toast, with cheddar cheese grated across the top. When I first met my other half, she was aghast that I pretty much relied on beans on toast several times a week, and set about teaching/forcing me to eat several other things – which is how I learned to cook bolognese, chilli, curry, and eventually roast dinner too.

I suppose, being British, it would be remiss of me not to list roast dinner too. After a cold day, sitting down with family to eat roast potatoes, steamed vegetables, and a roast meat of some description is hard to beat. Yorkshire puddings are probably the Crown Jewels of roast dinner, but incredibly difficult to make consistently – thankfully they can be bought ready-made these days.

Just reading back through the food above, I’m pretty basic, aren’t I. I don’t like fussy food – I can’t be bothered with it. I like warming, filling food. Home cooked food. It’s a running joke that I’ll often read a menu no further than “Stake and Ale Pie” in a pub. Don’t laugh – you can judge a pub or restaurant by their steak and ale pie.
An Adventure in London

September 13, 2025

After setting the alarm clock to go off at 7am this morning – affording me an hour to have a wash, get dressed, and get to the railway station, my wonderful body of course decided that 6am was a much better time to be waking up. I’m not entirely sure how it achieves this kind of feat so reliably. I wonder if it’s linked to our cats ability to start asking for food on the stroke of 3pm, and 11pm?

Actually – scratch that – our old ginger cat – George – asks for food whenever anybody goes anywhere near the kitchen – because why else would anybody be going anywhere near his food bowl, other than to feed him?

So. I found myself up and at ‘em, showered, dressed, and on the first weekend train to London – destined to meet friends visiting from California to help give them some bearings. They wanted to do something British, so the British Museum naturally came to mind. They worried that I would want to spend the day there until I volunteered that the British Museum is perhaps my favourite place to visit in the entire city.

The only problem with the British Museum is its size – meaning that “meeting at the museum” is something of a logistical nightmare. I arrived on one side of the museum – they arrived on the opposite side. Both sides have columns. I ended up asking for a screenshot of the map from their phone – minutes later they jumped out of the crowd at me with toothy grins, and tales of their journey from America while we waited in the queue.

I don’t envy visitors to London from America. Their cities are organised into straightforward grids – blocks – where most roads are parallel or perpendicular, and clearly named at each junction. London looks much more like somebody spilled the entire contents of a saucepan filled with cooked spaghetti on the floor and then stirred it around for a while before hiding half the road signs.
Thankfully GPS was our friend throughout the day. Thinking back, it’s quite shocking to think how many skills were required – taken for granted even – when visiting cities in years gone by. If you couldn’t find your way with a pocket spiral bound A-Z map book, you were pretty much lost.

We spent much of the morning wandering around the British Museum – gazing at, and reading about the collections of stuff wealthy benefactors had pilfered from the rest of the world (I’ll give credit to a good friend for “pilfered” – coined during a walk with her around the Victoria and Albert museum a year or so ago).
There’s only so many Egyptian statues, Roman fertility frescos, Byzantine weapons, or dark age long boats you can look at before either your feet start to hurt, or you get hungry.

We got hungry.

After visiting the Lewis chessmen, we made our way out into the city once more.
Where to take international visitors for something to eat in an international city where anything and everything is a possibility around every street corner?
One of our merry band opined that fish and chips might be rather lovely.
Ok. So where to get fish and chips – and sit down – and get a drink?

Wetherspoons.

We walked “a few blocks” in their parlance across the city towards Leicester Square (which required a pronunciation lesson – yes – English makes no sense – it’s “Lester”), and a little pub tucked away in the corner of the square that’s part of the mighty Wetherspoons chain – where we could hopefully get fish and chips and a drink without too much fuss – and get an authentic British pub experience into the bargain.

We lucked into a table – against the odds I must say – the pub was FULL – and put our order in through the mobile app. We somehow managed to choose a drink that was a single shot – causing much hilarity around the table – pouring it into other drinks, and ordering a further drink. Thankfully Wetherspoons are fast.
After eating ourselves to a standstill, and talking about our life and careers (I always find everybody else’s stories far more interesting than my own), we set off once more – for a little sightseeing at Trafalgar Square.

The weather had other ideas.

It wasn’t so much “the heavens opened” as “somebody kicked a planet sized bucket over in the sky”. We ran for cover under a hotel awning, and while wondering how long the wind might take to blow the deluge away, lucked into the kind of entertainment you really can’t plan – an actual, live, enormous, raucous protest march by perhaps a hundred thousand people through the middle of the city.

The theme of the march wasn’t lost on my American friends – pretty much denouncing everything and anything right wing, fascist, sexist, or patriarchal. As the legions of people walked past – flanked by hundreds of police officers – I found myself looking across their ranks – trying to figure out if there were any particular skews among them. There really weren’t – it was young and old, students, professional people, families, couples, friends, all colours, all races. All demanding an end to the very thing we can all see coming in the news each day.

We decided to call it a day after the excitement of the protest march, and picked our way through the back streets to the apartment my friends had rented. I stayed for a little while – it really was a wonderful apartment – before saying my goodbyes and descending into a nearby underground station to begin the trek home.

What a wonderful day. Perhaps a reminder that each day is what we make of it – and that unless (as Mr Baggins famously said) we step outside our door, we might never discover quite where our feet will carry us off to.
Everything, Everywhere, Again

September 12, 2025
At some point yesterday – nearly five days later than planned – and now with most of the holiday gone when I might have stage managed the migration smoothly and expertly – “The” blog has appeared at the place it should have appeared several days ago.

I’m using a capitalised “The” in the same way those with religious faith do – to establish some sort of invented importance in something that doesn’t actually exist. Yes – you’re reading these words on the internet, but what are they really? The words are nothing more than a series of microscopic magnetic deviations inside a piece of electrically powered hardware deep within an internet connected storage facility somewhere aboard the ball of mud we hurtle through space on.

“The” blog should have arrived smoothly, and with little fuss – with a nice notice going out across the social networks, and a calm transition plan ticking through like clockwork. Instead it stumbled, cut both its knees, cried for quite some time, then realised nobody was taking any notice of it, so quietly got up in search of anybody else that might hear it’s sob story (you’re reading it right now).

If you made it this far through this epic mis-direction of a blog post, well done indeed.

The TLDR version – Ghost has joined the party at last.

The blog to end all blogs I stood up about six months ago, before quietly shuttering it in a fit of “why am I doing ANY of this?” has been resurrected, and has essentially become the “source of all things” (except it’s not, because I have at least two or three backups elsewhere of all of my blog posts). The source of all things you can find, perhaps.

Anyway.

You can now read my idiotic words at any of the following locations:
```
◦   Ghost ~ https://recursivewords.com
◦   WordPress ~ https://recursivewords.blog
◦   Tumblr ~ https://recursive-words.tumblr.com
◦   Substack ~ https://recursivewords.substack.com
```
They all harbour the same stuff, so it doesn’t really matter where you subscribe, add, friend, follow, or whatever it is you do at each place. Pick your favourite. I’ve taken the liberty of transferring the email subscriptions from Substack over to Ghost for now, because that stops the other platforms claiming you as their own and spamming you to death with offers of a better life in return for joining their Soylent Green sausage machines.

I think I’ve covered this quite enough now. I was going to make the common analogy about the flogging of a certain equine species, but that will probably cause PETA to come after me these days.

Back in the real world, I’m staring down the barrel of the last day of my staycation (if you don’t count the weekend). For the last two days I’ve been fighting a running battle with the weather – I suspect somebody, somewhere is watching me hang washing out, poised with their fingers on the rain switch. Every time I put anything on the line, the sky clouds-up like an alien invasion is happening. Or at least a Steven Spielberg alien invasion. Have you ever noticed how that always happens in his movies? The cloud thing?

While on the subject, it turns out Spielberg is working on a follow-up of sorts to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Its working title (which has changed several times) is “Disclosure”. The conspiracy theory nutcases are already claiming that the movie might feature a real UFO. Where do they even dream this stuff up from? Of course this is where I eat humble pie in 18 months time, when they let on that the little green guy with almond shaped eyes in “Paul” was real.

I loved the movie “Paul” (if you’ve not seen it, you’ve missed out – go see it!). I’ve never known a movie so lovingly and gently mock so many beliefs, faiths, conspiracy theories, history books, and movies in the space of an hour and a half.

The Agent Zoil joke still makes me eye-roll now.

Oh – before I forget – we watched “Margin Call” last night – a thriller loosely based on the sub-prime banking disaster of the late 2000s. I had not heard of it before it started turning up in various internet feeds in recent days. It stars Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and more. It was like watching a car-crash unfolding in slow motion, with the best character actors imaginable.

(several minutes pass while a succession of phone calls happen)

I had been planning to get take-away for everybody, but half the household have organised pizza for themselves from the supermarket already. Their loss, I suppose.

Tomorrow morning I’m setting off bright and early into the city to meet a friend that’s visiting from America for a few days. It’s going to be fun. I imagine jet lag will have hit them like a truck by tomorrow. I won’t laugh, honest.

My god. I just read back through this head-emptying deluge. I’ve never seen so many changes of subject in a blog post. Maybe this is what I should have been doing all along – just spurting out random subjects like Trump does – changing direction mid-sentence. Maybe I should practice the accordion hand-movements too? It always amuses me – as soon as you see the hands start moving, you know the top-tier made-up stuff is coming.

Moment of the week – catching a clip of Jimmy Carr doing stand-up in front of a US audience, where somebody asked him which is more woke – the US or UK. He paused for a moment, and asked if they had seen the new show starring the guy that used to be on “The Apprentice”… it’s a pretty popular show – it’s called “The News”…
Escape

September 11, 2025

This morning you find me holed up in a corner of Wetherspoons – escaping from the world for an hour. I’ve just made a “small American breakfast” disappear, and am about to re-fill the cappuccino next to my phone.

Escape has become a theme recently. Escape from obligation, escape from expectation… escape from lots of things. It’s a temporary escape, but sometimes needed.

I’m writing this on Thursday morning, and it feels like the first proper “day off” of the staycation so far. That said, I still managed to have a shower, shave, and put two loads of washing through the machine before leaving the house this morning.

I should perhaps volunteer that I did battle with an enormous spider that had taken up residence in the dirty washing overnight. I think it ran across the bed last night – much to my other half’s amusement. I thought I saw it from the corner of my eye, but couldn’t find it after sitting bolt upright in bed. By “did battle”, I of course mean that I tipped the washing out, and then pulled each piece of clothing away one at a time until the spider presented itself – underneath the final shirt. It made a run for a clothes hangar on the corner of the bed – it’s probably still there. I’ll drop it out of the window later today – it can go terrorise the garden.

Thinking about the “things we do” on a typical day, I wonder what constitutes the minimum, before doing as little as possible becomes socially unacceptable? If I don’t have a shave and shower on a morning, I don’t feel awake. I would probably smell pretty bad too.

After leaving here, I’ll drop into the supermarket and buy enough coffee to keep the entire town awake for a few months – or myself for a day or two.

I’m not very good at escaping. Even while escaping, I’m thinking of things to do not just when I return, but on my way back. There’s always something to get, something to fix, something to fetch, something to take, something to do.

I wonder if Tibetan monks have a small army of helpers that scurry around doing everything while they sit cross-legged pretending to contemplate the universe?
Trying to slow down

September 10, 2025

After a dinner-table conversation last weekend, somehow I agreed to escort my eldest daughter to a nearby town with a ginormous shopping centre. I didn’t actually need anything, but thought it might be a fun day out, and we’ve not done anything together for a while – so the “everything must be fair” part of my brain kicked in.

We left the house a little after 9:30 this morning – wrapped in jumpers and coats to defeat some really quite impressive driving rain. The train left at 10am – almost like clockwork – and delivered us to our destination somewhat successfully. I say somewhat, because I automatically made my way to the train platform for London-bound trains mid-route. Thankfully my daughter realised and laughed at me.

I’ll blame the cold. Or getting old. Or being a bit of an idiot sometimes.

The next several hours were spent wandering around a huge shopping centre called “The Oracle”. As far as I am aware, there is no “oracle” in “The Oracle” – it’s just a load of big department stores, flogging their wares at you from every angle.

While wandering along, I remarked how absolutely potty it must make people feel that work in that environment all day, every day. Imagine the canned music – the succession of customers – the inevitable layers of middle management – the jobsworth floor staff…

I somehow came home with nothing. It wasn’t for want of trying. I made it to the gigantic Apple Store in “The Oracle”, and discovered it was just as frustrating and annoying as every other Apple Store – with an army of blue shirted lunatics that you must have a conversation with about the thing you want, rather than just grabbing the thing you want, and paying for it.

I swear – if Google or Amazon ever launch self-service brick-and-mortar stores, they will decimate Apple. Most people buying tech stuff know damn well what they want, and just want to get it – not talk about it, be up-sold on it, or anything else.

Deep breaths. Again.

My younger charge bought an eyebrow pencil (I’ve probably called it the wrong thing), some bath bombs, some socks, and a few other bits and pieces. I treated us to sushi at lunchtime.

While eating and chatting about this and that, I asked my daughter if she had seen the movie “Wicked Little Letters” yet – she had not. I started giggling to myself – recalling lines from the movie – and she asked what was so funny. I looked around, and thinking there was nobody nearby, recounted one of the most horrific sweary lines from the movie. Moments later we got up, and I discovered there had been a girl sitting DIRECTLY behind me as I quoted the horrific line. I thought I might die. Oh how I wished the world could have opened up and swallowed my whole.

While leaving, I glanced over, and realised the girl was wearing headphones. She hadn’t heard a thing.

You have never seen a middle-aged-man look so relieved in your entire life.

Before coming home we re-visited the shopping mall, and I wandered into a huge record store. I ALMOST bought several vinyl records for the record player. I’m not sure why I didn’t in the end. I guess part of it is down to our house being so chaotic at the moment. There’s typically seven of us around of an evening – which makes finding any quiet corner pretty much impossible – let alone getting the lounge to yourself to listen to some music.

In consolation, I bought a huge bag of peanut M&Ms on the way home, and followed the labelling on the bag – to share them. I ended up giving the second half of the bag to my daughter, then wondered where on earth she had put them all when she handed me the wrapper a few minutes later.

Anyway.

Somehow five of my nine days off work have already gone. How has that even happened? I’m going to slow things down tomorrow – on purpose. Probably go out for breakfast, get some chores done, and try to tidy the house up a bit. I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with the blog. Alongside the whole cross-posting escapade (which will continue), I’ve been tinkering with Ghost (an alternative to WordPress, Tumblr, and Substack) – spectacularly unsuccessfully so far. Their own techs have singularly failed to setup a domain name – for reasons unknown at this point. I’m not sure I even care any more.

Maybe I’ll take a step sideways, sit down, and actually try to read some blogs tomorrow, rather than relentlessly charge towards the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. I need to SLOW THE HELL DOWN.
A Day in the City

September 8, 2025

After escaping the house a little after 9am this morning, we made our way to the local railway station, collected tickets, and jumped on the first post rush-hour train towards London. By “we”, I mean myself, my better half, and our middle daughter – who had been longing to visit the city for some time – to visit the huge LEGO store in Leicester Square.

The journey towards Paddington was remarkably quiet – I can’t remember the last time I travelled into the city when not commuting, or fighting the weekend crowds.

From Paddington we descended beneath the city, and hurtled via the Elizabeth line towards the centre – avoiding the rest of the network which had been brought to its knees by yet another strike.

We emerged near Hamleys – the famous toy-shop. I had no idea we were going there before turning the corner towards it, so followed everybody else and tried to look enthusiastic – challenging with a cough, and horrific cold.

I half watched the demonstrations of toys on the various floors – given by a small army of manic teenagers that left me feeling slightly uneasy. Surely normal people aren’t that perpetually happy? Do they have a “Barbie from Toy Story” moment when the public leave – dropping their face, and cursing streams of naughty words to let off steam?

After Hamleys, we set off towards Leicester Square and some lunch. After rounding the statue of William Shakespeare, we found a pub of the same chain my daughter works for tucked away in a corner, and made good use of her discount.

On the way I passed a fifty-something American female tourist audibly criticising everybody passing her in the street. Given that I already felt a bit rubbish, and therefore had a pretty short bullshit fuse, I seriously considered stopping and challenging her her – wondering if she actually realised that other people could hear her toxic commentary?

I’m not sure what I might have said. It wouldn’t have been kind, so it’s perhaps best that I kept my mouth shut.

Finally – after eating ourselves to a standstill in a quite wonderful little pub (must remember it next time!), we set off to the entire point of the day (or the entire point of the day for our middle daughter) – the LEGO store.

Visiting the LEGO store was SUCH a different experience during the week, on a school week. I didn’t buy anything, but I wandered around and reminisced about my own childhood. I kind of wish they would release the early 1980s “Space LEGO” kits that I grew up with. I could re-live my youth.

My middle daughter bought a frightening amount of LEGO kits. She’s working now, and earning almost entirely expendable income. She used it, and then some. She bought so much, they pulled in managers to give her extra freebies at the checkout – among them a signed poster of the biggest kit she bought – signed by the designers of the kit in Denmark. I felt so happy for her – the people in the store all stopped for a moment to “Ooooh” as the scene unfolded.

I’ve known Apple stores enact the “be awesome” clause from time to time, but never the LEGO store. It made me smile.

Talking of Apple, after leaving the LEGO store we set off for Covent Garden. My other half wanted to take a look at the Moomin store – that she didn’t get to visit last Christmas because of the crowds. While she wandered around the Covent Garden market stalls, I sloped off to the Apple Store.

I’ve not been in an Apple Store for years. I was quite shocked. I imagine most people that set foot in Apple Stores know exactly what they’re going in there for – so WHY do you have to have a conversation with one of the blue shirted lunatics about it? I would have bought a folding keyboard for my iPad – if I could have picked one up and taken it to the checkout. But no. That’s not how it works. You have to talk to some idiot about it, then they go and get one for you, and then they process the payment with you in the middle of the store. I get it. It’s probably to stop stuff getting stolen – but it’s one step away from grocery stores 100 years ago. I thought the world had moved on.

Also – something else that makes no sense – Apple only make about twenty things – so then WHY have twenty of each thing on display? What is the point of letting people play with an array of devices that only really show any benefit once you’re logged into them, with your own information, accounts, and applications installed? It’s plain stupid.

Sorry. I’ve descended into foaming invective, haven’t I.

After finding my other half at the Moomin store, we wandered back towards a station – and stopped at a nice looking outdoor cafe in the sunshine. While waiting for the glacial table service to take and deliver our order, I found myself people-watching London happening around us.

I wondered if a pretty, anxious lady with dark hair standing outside The Ivy had been stood up by a date – before the best smile spread across her face, and she waved to a similar aged woman walking towards her through the crowds. Their embrace and toothy grins made the world suddenly a little less awful.

A group of women a couple of tables away from us made me smile for entirely different reasons. When I worked in London years ago, I would often go for a walk at lunchtime, and would sometimes stray towards “The City” – the financial district. It was pretty obvious that sexist hiring ruled back then – with cover-model girls walking into and out of the big banks and insurance companies. The group of girls sitting across from us were straight out of that mould – plaid skirts, perfect makeup, and perfect hair.

We finally left the cafe, and set off towards home – cramming ourselves onto another Elizabeth Line train. I stood for perhaps the first half hour, then as people departed the train along the way, we all found seats. While standing, I found myself exchanging glances with a young woman a little further along the train – who similarly found herself hanging from the roof railings. We both seemingly fell victim to not being rude, pushy, or thoughtless – traits which seem to afflict an awful lot of people in the city. I lost count during the day of the times I found myself separated from my family after being pushed out of the way while walking along busy footpaths, or through busy stores.

While walking towards our house from the railway station I felt sorry for my daughter – struggling with the LEGO she had bought – and didn’t even ask before taking the bags from her hands. She might play rugby, and go to the gym, and a hundred other things, but sometimes the superhuman strength of a Dad is needed. I didn’t let on how much the bags hurt my hands while walking the rest of the way home.

And so here we are. We survived a day in the city together. London is always exciting to arrive in – as is any big city, I imagine – but it’s also nice to leave it behind too.
Everything, Everywhere

September 7, 2025
After watching the inexorable march of Substack towards the same commercially driven hellscape as countless platforms before it, I’ve been scouting around for alternatives.

Once I started looking, I quickly discovered a quiet exodus of similarly minded writers going on right under my nose. A small army of similarly fed up writers in search of somewhere less obviously commercial to land their words and stories.

The consensus seemed to centre around a collection of known quantities – WordPress, Tumblr, and Ghost – so I started tinkering to see how difficult it might be to join the exodus.

Don’t get me wrong – Substack is very good at what it does – offering an easy means to sending out an email newsletter, and a straightforward way to monetise it – which is wonderful if you have a newsletter filled with marketable content.

A personal blog – a diary, or journal – isn’t really marketable – no matter how you spin it. Sure, during the height of the blogging boom in the late 2000s we saw the likes of Belle de Jour, Dooce, and Petite Anglaise get book and TV deals – but they didn’t sell their original blogs. The wonderful thing about blogs was always their accessibility and availability.

On a side-note, I was stunned to read recently that Belle de Jour (the basis for the TV show starring Billie Piper) may not have actually happened. I’m guessing in the excitement of discovering years ago that a research scientist was operating as a sex worker on the side and writing a tell-all blog about her adventures, nobody bothered to find out if her journaled adventures were actually true – there was probably too much money to be made furthering the story and reporting it. Eyeballs. Clicks. Traffic.

So.

For the moment, I am cross-posting to Substack, WordPress, and Tumblr. Ghost will happen soon enough too – giving those that want to read a selection of places they might find my words. It’s then up to each reader to choose the place that best fits their preferences in terms of subscribing, following, or whatever it is you might do at each place.

Here’s where the words will live:
```
◦   Substack - https://recursivewords.substack.com
◦   WordPress - https://recursivewords.blog
◦   Tumblr - https://recursive-words.tumblr.com
◦   Ghost - watch this space
```
Once Ghost is up and running – a properly independent blog, not running on somebody else’s platform – I’ll migrate the existing email subscriptions over – until them, feel free to go explore. I’m not going all-in with WordPress, because I suspect Automattic’s court fight with WP Engine could end up destroying them. We’ll see.

In a few months time I’ll share the experience of each space. It will be interesting to find out how readers at the different platforms interact – how discovery happens – how connections happen.

In the meantime, I’ll just try to keep writing. Keep sharing.

I’ve also been experimenting recently with a wonderful app called “Day One” – that has encouraged me to write more often, even if I don’t share everything I record within it. I’m using it right now – writing this. It’s been a good experience so far – encouraging me to empty my head – to unburden myself of at least a little of the crazy load.

If you’ve not heard of it, perhaps go take a look.