Now

Last updated 4 August 2026

I am about eleven thousand words into something that is either a long essay or a short book, and the uncertainty is starting to be the problem rather than a feature of the early stage. It is about attention — not the productivity kind, the older kind, the sort Simone Weil meant. Whether that survives contact with a reader is an open question.

Reading

Slowly, and mostly at seven in the morning, which is a recent and unwelcome change. Sebald, again, for the fourth time and the first time properly. A borrowed copy of The Copenhagen Trilogy that I have now had for long enough to be embarrassing. A great deal of nineteenth-century travel writing that I am telling myself is research.

Writing

Two mornings a week, which is fewer than I want and more than I managed last year. The shape of an afternoon piece was an attempt to talk myself out of resenting that, and it half worked.

Not doing

Speaking. Teaching. Anything involving a deadline set by somebody else. I said yes to all three too often between 2023 and 2025 and the writing is only now recovering from it.

This is a now page. It replaces itself rather than accumulating, so there is no archive of previous versions and no feed — the bits are the place to look for what changed.