The Ideas I Sat On for Years
I have always been an ideas person. For most of my life that has been a mixed blessing. The ideas arrived freely, and then they stayed put, because the gap between having an idea and putting it into the world was filled with people I had to pay, trust, and
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 quiet
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
The Love Language You Speak Isn't the One You're Listening For
Why I built a tool that measures the gap Gary Chapman pointed at but never mapped. For thirty years, one idea has quietly shaped how millions of couples talk about love. You've almost certainly met it. Maybe you can even name your own: words of affirmation, quality time,
What I Couldn't Name
You can't be intimate with what you can't name. This is a piece about why I built a feelings wheel — and why I put shame at the centre of it. This post comes in two parts. The first is the story. The second is the theory
How We Broke Dating
Listen to the essay read by the author0:00/1984.3426761× Online dating was meant to widen the field. It sorted it instead — and the conclusions both sides have drawn from what remained are, by the design of the system, almost guaranteed to be wrong. A long argument from inside
The Voices and the Drum
Cape Town, end of April 2026 Anyone who knows me knows how much I care about music education. I'm a trustee of the Voces8 Foundation and Chair of Morabe Rural Music, a Suffolk-based charity that puts music education into primary schools. A meaningful share of my volunteer
It's hard to hate someone whose story you know
A sentence worth sitting with — and what it asks of us, both in the listening and in the telling. A coaching peer shared this line with me recently, and it landed with the quiet force of something I'd half-known my whole life but never quite heard put
I watched Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary. Here's what stayed with me.
And why I put together a cheat sheet for the dads in my life. There's a scene early in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere — now streaming on Netflix — where a group of young men stop in the street to tell one of these influencers that he's
