I am Adrian Melrose, Welcome!
Coach, community builder, father, writer, music obsessive, and a man with his heart permanently split between London and Cape Town.
I am, as you'll quickly discover, more than one thing at once. That's not a disclaimer — it's the whole point.
This is the place where all of it lives. Not the polished version, not the professional bio, not the carefully curated brand. Just me — figuring things out in public, sharing the journey, and trusting that honesty is more useful than performance.
If you're looking for my coaching work, you'll find it at plaintalk.co.uk. If you're looking for my work with groups and men — the community spaces, the writing on masculinity, loneliness and what it means to truly connect — that lives at 8notes.co.uk and 8notes.substack.com.
This site is something different. This is where you get to know the whole person behind both of those things.
The weight loss quest. The events space I'm building in Cape Town. The questions I'm sitting with about purpose, identity, and what a fully inhabited life actually looks like. The things I care about deeply — joy, music, parenting, belonging, the and/and rather than the either/or.
We are all of us messy, still-becoming human beings. Seeking meaning, connection, and permission to be more than one thing at once.
That's what this space is for.
Start here — The Man With Many Names
Ep3: Care or Fear? (part 2 of 2)
Part two. On the difference between consideration and codependence — and why you have to learn it on purpose For part one - please read here, a better start. I ended the last piece with a question I couldn't answer for most of my adult life. When you stay
The Cape Didn't Fit
On the truth I couldn't tell my wife, where I learned to stay silent, and the pattern that runs more marriages than anyone admits We never actually decided who would look after the children. Or rather — we did, and we didn't. We made the decision the
The Alarm Next Door
What a snooze button taught me about a job I was given at six years old I'm on holiday with a group of friends, most of them a good deal younger than me. And this morning I lay in bed, rigid with irritation, listening to the woman in
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